I have worked with numerous designers at many companies over the past few decades, and I have never quite understood the view that "few poles = good surface". Seems like people are often striving to produce curves and surfaces with "light math" (i.e. as few poles as possible). Why is that??
If you're going to be editing the surface by moving its poles around, I can see that it's important to have as few poles as possible. But if you're building some sort of sweep surface, and you'll always be editing it by modifying its defining curves, why do you care how many poles it has? Or, if you're building an aesthetic blend surface, you'll be editing its shape parameters (radius, rho, etc.), not its poles; so, again, why does it matter that the surface has "light math"?
Do people think that the number of poles is somehow an indicator of some sort of surface "quality"? I don't see much correlation, myself -- it's easy to produce a horrible surface with a dozen poles, or a beautiful one that has hundreds of poles. Puzzled.