Ubercart

I'm in a similar situation in that I've built out a site with a fair amount of CCK, node type-based templating, and now need to support taxes on some products but not others. Having to retrofit all of that to accommodate a couple of new node types seems like a pain. Why should taxes be dependent on something as rigid as a node type (ie something that, in Drupal, often has so many other structural implications)?

I've tried changing this at the Workflow NG level, but it seems like I can't get any more granular than the entire order. I can tax if an entire order is shippable or not, but it doesn't seem like I can make tax applicable only to particular products within an order that are shippable or not.

In my view, distinct node types should be set up for distinct information architecture (CCK, special functionality) and themeing (node-type templates, hook_nodeapi), not for setting up categorization and meta info. Seems like the product class = node type setup is too rigid if "class" is a simple categorization tool (as the tax module seems to use it as). Seems like taxonomy would be better for product classes, and then people could additionally create different product node types only if they really need different CCK/architectures.