Re: Atom tech VS Polygons.
Interesting. Shows how much I know about 3D technology.
After looking around for a bit, it seems I was partially right: the main reason NURBS isn't used as frequently is that everything needs to be made up of shapes put together (although not necessarily primitives, as I had thought). The big issue that brings up is seams. For anything animated (especially procedurally), that can become a huge pain to deal with. Also, it can be difficult to manage textures on more complicated models since each piece of it needs its own texture.
Also, on a technical level, NURBS (NURBSes? NURBSs? I don't know) don't get directly rendered anyway - at one point or another, they're turned into triangles so they can be rendered. I would assume that with polygons, that process goes faster. Not sure if that's entirely true though.