Hi Morat, well it's not "cheating" if it does what you need!

If it's a structured area that you want to have as a separate material than cutting your model at that spot is a good way to do it.

> Learning to not have things be one object if they don't need to be seems like it might
> be a key bit of learning for MoI - are there any recommended 'best practices for newcomers to
> NURBS modelling' things out there to get a leg-up on that kind of knowledge?

Well, unfortunately there isn't just one single universal rule for whether it's good to have things as one object or not, it really depends on the particular situation and the specific goals for how the model will be used. There are some tips here for people coming from a polygon modeling background: http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=4865.2 and those are mostly tips about doing the reverse - trying to build a model as an initial larger piece and then removing some material doing booleans rather than trying to always model everything in a smaller "patch by patch" type method (which people coming from a poly modeling background usually tend to do since they've trained themselves to avoid booleans)

But there are cases where making things in separate pieces is better suited for the particular task at hand. That's why both ways are supported, and there are tools like Trim and Join that do allow you to work at an individual surface level. But when it's possible to work with objects as larger chunks at the solids level using booleans instead of Trim & Join, it usually saves time.

- Michael