I wish there was more training on using nurb's in Maya. They have been out of favored for so long and are so poorly maintained everyone fears using them. Yet they can be extremely powerful. Especially for hard surface models.

Not many really understand how they work any more and even texts I have read can be full of misleading examples where they do not realize the affects of things like surface parameterization, nor do they even speak of surface continuity.

Many packages with up to date Nurbs tools automate parameterization and handle it far better then Maya. Maya's Nurb's tool set is really incomplete and has some features that do not even make sense with out tools to utilize them properly. For instance degree 2, 5, and 7 curves in Maya are useless without proper continuity control tools that are not in the Maya nurbs tool set. I believe their only purpose is therefore to support data import from more sophisticated nurbs modeling apps like alias - which was called studiotools the last time nurbs in maya were given any attention.