@Mrog: Got cha…though I think there’s a bit of some faulty footing you’re on with regards to data translation. If I bring said “light weight” NURBS into say Modo or zBrush then you are going to see that the same “heaviness” found in importing the data in. This is not what happens when going back and forth as a raster to vector. They’re all just different mathematical equations to represent what we see on the screen. There are advantages to being in both data sets to achieve certain intended outputs. Also lets not kid ourselves into think that NURBS can’t get heavy just on their own. Having a range of features can still create a heavy data set that cause long rebuild times…etc.
Check the below screen shot that shows how a model can be set up for conversion when converting from SubD to NURBS. As “machines” start to take input from a wider range of sources there will be less need to have to convert to NURBS. I’ve CNC’ed from a mesh and it works fine but it can be production process dependent…