Hi Moe, these are definitely going to be a focus area for version 2.0 - I want to add an object organization type panel which should let you do sort of grouping and "selection set" type stuff there.

Another thing related to that will be an "object properties" type panel that will let you set stuff like basic colors and stuff for objects, I want to make that handle the kind of material stuff that you are asking about as well.

I haven't quite started on this area yet, but it will start to happen pretty soon, you should see more discussion on this in the next few weeks or so.

It will be a pretty big area of work, it will probably stretch out to a couple of months or so before it is all complete.

- Michael