Well, under cycles I had created a rather convoluted setup to allow me to recolor the eyes (including both the iris and pupil) while also handling glow for the eyes.

The recoloring was convoluted, but doable (and remains so under BI), but the glow I am not very certain about. Under cycles, the glow was handled by using the emissive property. But, because I was also using emissive for making a toon material, I had to divide the emissive in the compositor: reduce it by 0.5 and then double the result in order to get areas that have glow applied and how much glow.

The glow would be easier to do if I could pass custom channels into the compositor, so that I could then use those to apply a blurring/brightening effect directly.

Also, as another note with regard to freestyle (I may have posted this to you on Google+): Freestyle doesn’t account for alpha masking. In my case, I had used a bent surface with an alpha-masked feather texture applied, and rather than drawing edges along the contours of the feather, it instead drew along the edges of the object geometry.

Actually, I think I should submit this freestyle issue to the bug tracker.

With this system, the nodes would get some improved features i think, being able to input new data types is the goal after all! I am curious what exact things you are thinking of? I am all for it myself!

I suppose, just taking my time wrapping my brain around the way they work, lol.

I will note, however, that it seems much easier to create decals and such using BI compared to Cycles. Doing it in cycles is quite convoluted, while with BI you can just hook up the underlying material as an input.

nodes are good in BI too just split to more different layers as texture,nodes,material nodes in cycles they are all together