The recent watering can tute shows pretty well how flexible the MoI Nurbs programme is.
I am using the watercan approach more often now myself.
There are so many programmes now with displacement painting that I feel one should do basic work in MoI and finness in one of those.
Good programmes are Carrara6Pro, 3D Coat and Hexagon.

The image attached shows an example where I aged a MoI item
in the Carrara vertex room with the displacement brush and gave it appropriate shaders. (I think!)

Hi Brian, that's definitely a good idea to combine sort of basic shaping in MoI and then fine detail added by displacement painting.

- Michael

This is a very rough and quick example of displacement painting on a sphere.
(In Carrara6Pro)
Displacement Painting with 3D painting, as in 3D Coat, are examples of "horses for courses"