Grasshopper is a magnificent tool and does not get the credit it deserves! It is a very specialized expertise and to get a product to manufacturing stage with a watertight parametric script means a lot more than just connecting a few mathematical flow charts. Grasshopper has some almost plug and play components such as voronoi, paneling and mesh manipulators. All you need to do in Rhino is load a NURBS surface and you are ready to create parametric structures on top of it. To maximize its potential, Grasshopper becomes an amalgamation of plugins and external scripts so for any company it is recommendable to appoint just one Grasshopper expert. The demand for these jobs is growing as companies are discovering the design opportunities it offers for any kind of product. Also there are many freelancers in Eastern Europe who are relatively good with this so the work is accessible. However some of the work can be done in Solidworks, if we use Grasshopper I think we do all need to charge for our expertise. Compare it to tattooing a cube vs. an organic 3D network with all kinds of effects. Even if we can revise the parametric structure, because of its complexity the design process can take much longer.
The shoe sole example can be done in several ways, for example force field operations on a hex grid or, more elegantly, Kangaroo physics simulation. Grasshopper works best going from surface to mesh. To convert the mesh back to NURBS, there is T-splines.