Hi Bravlin - high valence worries is something that applies to sub-d modeling, not to static mesh rendering as long as vertex normals are coming through and being used in the render.

But what can happen with network surfaces with poles are surface shaping defects with little ripples in the surface as different shapes shrink down and collapse to a point.

One technique that can help alleviate that is to include a circle before the pole in the network curves, that helps to even out shaping before things collapse to a point, see attached version.

- Michael