Hi Jesse, I was experimenting a bit with network surface in Rhino to see the differences.

One thing I noticed was that the network surface will often have isoparms that flex and bend around, especially as they approach the singularity. On the other hand in this case the sweep generates completely planar isoparms throughout, in some ways this is a bit more predictable in how the surface is constructed.

The other thing is that you don't have to make the scaling rail actually touch all the profiles, profiles will stretch up to match the scaling rail even if you pull it away from the original profiles. So in a sense the rail has more "weight" assigned to it. Network is not like this, everything is more equally weighted there and pulling the "rail" out doesn't cause the surface to hug right against it.

The other thing that is interesting is the implicit symmetry from the center line that you get with the scaling rail - with network surface you have to go through some extra effort to get symmetry edits.

It seems like there may be some reasons to prefer the sweep + scaling rail for some symmetrical shapes rather than network.

At any rate, it certainly looks like the scaling rail boosts up the potential of sweep by quite a bit.

- Michael