The thing that I have found is LARGE SURFACE VARIATION = LARGE NURBS MODEL. There does not seem to be any getting around this one yet. Tooling producers will cry if you tell them you want to give them a triangulated model, but the nurbs representation can be just as large, or even LARGER than the triangulated version. I fail to see in many situations where the nurbs is actually going to better to machine from where there is a lot of surface variation.