Don't sweat it NURB's are out of fashion in the entertainment industry. In the 3D CAD and high end surfacing industry they are the primary form of modeling still however. Actually trimming and Booleaning and the ability to add very smooth, precise, and tangent rounds and fillets, extremely quickly, is the primary advantage of NURB's over polygons.

In Maya however, the seam tessellation algorithms are in a word - crap! My mother after taking a 2 week BASIC programming course could write a better seam tessellation algorithm then the ones that Maya uses which were written probably a year before Maya was released in 1998 and I doubt they have been looked at since! LOL

Use a package like Rhino, Solid Works and Inventor and the fillets and rounds and Booleaned seams are perfect! You do not have to sit there and diddle manually with tessellation like you do in Maya or even Alias.

Polygons are much easier to texture paint as you can paint across seams with many different packages or avoid the seams all together. You cannot avoid seams in NURB's as every surface has to be an all quad patch and so the only way to make holes for instance is to trim. I am not sure that there are any paint apps that work with nurbs models that would have tons of seams.