In the Maya Octane plugin, there is a good implementation of the ORBX Material. It allows users to by pass dcc for material creation.
It's not a replacement for the current workflow but an added option if people prefer to work this way. It would work in a very similar way to the ORBX Object Loader but for materials. When accessing the ORBX Material, rather than showing attributes inside of C4D it would give the option to open a SA node graph for authoring materials as well give the ability to build material libraries in SA and easily import them into C4D without worrying about LiveDB or checking that they translate properly into the plugin environment.