I have a question... Is there a reason why you use the mapping for scale rather than using the scale on the texture nodes? I've noticed this several times and I was wondering if there was a reason why.
I guess it's just because of the Blender way. There's a bunch of places where you can do the same thing and you just pick one. I'd say there's nothing to it more than that. And since we've all probably get used to changing the scale in the mapping node, that's what the majority of people do, just out of habit.
As Omar said, it's mostly because of habit of doing this way for a long time.
I don't remember where, but I saw someone showing that it's a little more optimized to change the scale on the mapping node instead of the using the scale on the texture node, so that's why I do this way.
But honestly that would only have a considerable effect when using a lot of texture nodes and I can't confirm if that is still true or not, but that's good test to experiment with.
