Tried it already. The result is unpredictable and anyways i'd like to use a weathered bitmap texture that's very hard if not impossible to reproduce in a procedural shader. The bend deformer also didn't work the way i want it to. It works perfect in one direction but as soon as you apply another bend vertically the object gets distorted. (i've deleted the history after the first bend ofcoz.)

The only similar topic i stumbled upon is in a Rhino forum, which reassures me that NURBS is the only way to go. I'm afraid i'll need to dig deeper into NURBS modeling if i want to get this done.