In my case "end-users" is just artists, so we just expose a bunch of sliders and toggles that tweak the effects, or in some cases turn them on or off. They're quite happy to let me write the fancy DOF shaders and just give them a few knobs to tweak.

In my case "end-users" is just artists, so we just expose a bunch of sliders and toggles that tweak the effects, or in some cases turn them on or off. They're quite happy to let me write the fancy DOF shaders and just give them a few knobs to tweak.

I think this excludes making radical changes like Hodgeman mentioned - switching from deferred shading to inferred shading to forward rendering with a data driven approach sounds pretty nice to me... Of course, when you have a specific technology setup, then it would be best to optimize specifically for it.

Ideally you could make your system flexible enough to allow both things to happen - make the blocks granular and flexible enough to be optimized and specialized for specific setups.