Tx, You have a good sense of automating the tedious work involved setting up materials. This is AI on a small but important scale. Especially for those among us who render for a living. So much of the work is unnecessarily repetitive.
That's exactly why I'm working on this toolset, because using Blender next to C4D every day made me feel that the node editor could greatly benefit from some love. Unfortunately there's only so much I can do, I had a bit of help from the devs to get started but apart from that Corona doesn't offer any documentation for Python scripting and even so, I don't have access to everything through the Python API.
I've made a bit of progress on the tools but I'm struggling with the Shared Shader, which is designed to work around the fact that a node in Cinema 4D can't have multiple parents (so a shader output can't be connected to several nodes by design). I'm talking about the classic Cinema 4D materials here, C4D Nodes Materials are something else entirely.
So it kind of works : the shaders are linked and work, but the node links aren't displayed properly. It could be ok if it was a one-time thing but unfortunately, the links disappear each time the node graph is refreshed ( like when copy-pasting a material to a new scene, or dropping the material in a new node editor view).