if i had my way, you'd have to create a brush for every different visual property. a little more work, but it really speeds things up when you've got 200 or 300 objects with the same brush, and you only need to set the visual properties once for all of them.
That was my first thought. Then I thought, well Mark would have to keep track of the brushes in code, and maybe there's a reason he can't or doesn't want to, so I came up with the idea of us doing it manually. If Mark would prefer to enforce upon us the use of brushes and handle it that way, I'd be perfectly happy with that instead. But this faffing about with surfaces is a joke.