Oh well, all I want is just to be able to KEEP all of the materials+textures that were created when I exported some models from another program and just convert them to a working renderman material...

Also about the phong materials... it's just what Maya likes to create materials with whenever I import a new obj. So I don't really have a preference over what type of material to use, it's just that all the textures are already connected to the Phong materials maya created when I imported the models.