Whatever studio I've been in, NURBS is just ignored. It was a lightweight way of getting smooth surfaces, when machines had problems with extremely high poly subdivisions, however a lot of modern pipelines don't even support them. In fact, Mental ray, in the background, converts all NURBS into polys before rendering. Polys are fast to learn and edit. NURBS has it's place in other industries such as Automotive design and manufacturing, but they're using specially designed NURBS software. Maya is lacking in this area. I don't even remember when the NURBS toolset in Maya was last updated. Just because it's there, doesn't mean you have to use it I know a lot of people that use the lofting function, but they always finish up in polys.