The way that Maya currently handles displacement is a huge pain in the ass. Displacement maps are plugged into the shading group, yet it is the material that is assigned to geometry. This means that if I want to share a material across objects with different displacement mapping it's necessary to assign a material first to each object to generate a shading group, then switch out the surface material in the shading group. Fine, this works, and the ability to share a material in this way is desirable. But it becomes incredibly tedious when having to do this repeatedly for lookdev, quicker texture map layout testing with a proxy shader such as a lambert, or various other reasons why it can be necessary to switch between assigned shaders during development. It frequently becomes necessary assign new shaders to objects just to generate a shading group that the desired material can be dropped into and the displacement map connected, since to my knowledge there is no easy way to reconnect an existing shading group to geometry. Previously I think someone came up with a MEL script to help with this scenario, but it's ludicrous that's even necessary. Ultimately this is a really clunky feature of Maya, especially now with the horribly jumpy nature of the hypershade and the difficulty in keeping multiple shading networks graphed without something disappearing every time you create a new node or connection. I suggest some sort of displacement map manager is required, or a better way of assigning shaders temporarily and being easily able to revert back to previous assignments.
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