This question begin to roam its way into my head via CT bram's question about modeling a gold ball, and Nitroliq's response that included a tutorial.
(thread can be found here

I know there are two different camps in maya, those whom believe in the bible of the all powerful Quad edged polygon ( I myself am mostly in this camp) and those who do not. That being said i suppose you could poke every ace on that after the second extrude, then delete every other edge on each face and you'd end up with quads, but I'm not going to take the time do do that 276, or 423 times.

I guess what i am getting at with this, is, When would you say its ok to deviate from the quad ( tris for game models obviously do not count in that question ) for a poly model?

I personally do not like to deviate from quads unless i just have to, and there are very very very few times when i do 'just have to' you get more predictability out of quads, for everything form Smoothing to animation so.

Also, a question i have had for a while is. Why is it that only the Maya users, or only work flows that require maya down the line, require Quads? is this a maya specific requirement and i just don't realize it because i am strictly a maya person?
or are other tutorial makers, just...oblivious to the correct way to do things? for other apps i mean.

g-man