There are three basic approaches, for deciding what to do when a material is selected:
- Studio: show the first BSDF (or Emitter), of the first Layer.
Cinema: show the last component (BSDF, Layer, etc) edited.
Other: show the component in the position last edited.
I think the plugin's choice (it's not by accident that it works this way) is more useful than Studio's, but that still leaves the third option, which I gather is what you are requesting. In this case, if you are editing Layer 3 > BSDF 2 in one material, and then switch to another, it would also be Layer 3 > BSDF 2 of that material which would initially be shown. However, this only works in the very specific case that a) the two materials have a similar structure, and that b) their shared structure has a similar meaning. When (a) is not true, the newly-selected material may either have too few Layers, or too few BSDFs in its 3rd layer, while when (b) is not true, though the plugin could indeed select the component in the prescribed position, there would be little point in its having done so (in other words, considering two materials, one metal, one glass, both with 1 Layer and 2 BSDFs, there is no useful benefit to selecting the 2nd BSDF when switching from one to the other).
Furthermore, the last two options are also mutually exclusive; that is to say, once we enter the (a) case, we are left with no basis upon which to make an intelligent selection, and can only fall back to the more simplistic Studio approach. In other words, once we move beyond the very specific case where all materials are very similar, the behavior quickly begins to appear as though it is random, since it does different things depending whether you select material A -> B -> C, or A -> C -> B, where C has even a slightly different structure than A & B. For this reason, it would definitely not be a preferable mode of operation to some (a good majority, I'd say) people, which means that it would need to be governed by a user preference.
- By Edward Leibnitz