As far as I can tell, the trouble with this node is that it doesn't actually do anything, it just sets the flag and the threshold for use during rendering. That's already quite useful, but it doesn't seem like a complete design.

For example, how does this node change data in a way that's visible with nodes? It seems important that it should do that. If the face corner normals were visible and editable with nodes, maybe that would work?
But we also don't want to do redundant calculations when it isn't necessary. Currently vertex and face normals can be calculated on demand, since they are just derived data. If they are calculated in the node tree, there should be a way to make sure they aren't recalculated unnecessarily later.

Maybe my comment just conveys a sort of general lack of clarity, and I think that's just what we need here.

Hani Tiby (Tiby) added a subscriber: Hani Tiby (Tiby).Nov 5 2021, 2:54 AM

Erik Abrahamsson (erik85) mentioned this in T92886: Curve to Mesh node causes other objects to edge split when not shaded smooth.Nov 7 2021, 12:01 AM

Zijun Zhou (Eary) mentioned this in T92948: geo nodes breaks auto smooth and weighted normal modifier..Nov 9 2021, 5:26 AM

michael campbell (3di) awarded a token.Nov 9 2021, 6:12 AM

Brilliant, thanks very much for the patch, this is a life saver!

Steffen Dünner (SteffenD) added a subscriber: Steffen Dünner (SteffenD).Nov 9 2021, 10:03 AM

I'm going to go ahead and close this one. We finally had some design discussion about this, and came to the conclusion that larger changes are necessary to create a proper workflow.

Actively looking for feedback on those design changes here: T93551: Mesh Auto Smooth and Normals Design Changes