Paul
I'm so glad you posted this, and I'm even more pleased to see that its under consideration. I think that you made the case well, so I'll just add examples to the record, in the hopes that they help move this to "SOON" rather than "Eventually" on the roadmap.
I suspect that around 80% of the interior partitions I have placed are some minor variation of a 3-5/8 stud with one layers of GWB on each side. (the variation being whether its rated, whether it has acoustical insulation, etc.). As a result, 2 or 3 wall types cover 80% of my interior partitions. But, if I had to make the finish part of the wall materials, instead of one family for a basic stud wall, I would need something like
- 3-5/8" stud with blue painted GWB on both sides
- 3-5/8" stud with green painted GWB on both sides
- 3-5/8" stud with blue painted GWB on one side and green painted GWB on the other
- 3-5/8" stud with blue panted GWB on one side and wall covering on the other
- 3-5/8" stud with green painted GWB on one side and wall covering on the other
You may need each of those repeated for combinations of fire rating, acoustic insulation, height of GWB (to ceiling, to structure, etc) and anything else that your office treats as a type property
The list gets longer and harder to manage as the number of paints and wall coverings increase, and it quickly becomes a management nightmare.
As you noted, one finish can span multiple surfaces and multiple substrates. It can also span across elements placed at different phases. So, a single paint color might be placed across a new GWB partition, onto an existing exterior wall, then onto a new CMU enclosure for an existing column, and onto the ceiling. But, in addition to spanning across multiple elements, one element could have several paint colors. For example, different colors above and below a chair rail. Or, I can imagine a great many instances where a single wall object is part of several rooms, and may have different finishes in each of them.
In considering "Finishes" as a category, I would also love to see an update to the way Revit handles finish carpentry. Placing sweeps on walls works, mostly. But there is plenty of room for improvement. Try wrapping your base molding around a column (pier) for example, or have a molding that stops short of the end of a wall, and the profile returns on itself. Or have a picture rail that turns and runs vertically for a section to follow the profile of a ceiling.
Thanks