Tiling a texture in the material options seems to do nothing

There needs to be an intuitive way in which these work. Internally, these offsets create additional variables you might not want to have. It's also per-texture, which is not always what you want. For example, if you have a material that has three textures, a diffuse, a specular and a normal map. Say you wanted to change the tiling of the whole material. In this case, you would have to adjust all of the separately, for something that should only require one parameter for all three. I need to think about this a bit :)

yeah its just a good way to try out an idea though for example I sometimes think hmm that floor is tiling too much... but I dont want to redo the uvs and reimport the model etc and I dont want to edit the shader as other things may use the same shader. Im not sure what the most ideal way of doing things would be but sometimes people would like the ability to control the tiling on each map seperately eg a detail normal map texture with fine bumps.

You can still make parameters like that with exposed values. Currently, Cubemap, Texture2D and Slider are the only Properties you can expose, but for example, you can have a slider that alters UVs for, like you said, a detail normal, which is done by multiplying the UVs with the slider :)

That said, I could have a checkbox to enable/disable the builtin scale+offset, and use a custom material inspector that hides the offset values for properties without it

Any progress on this aspect? Would be nice to have it usable even if it's not as efficient or intuitive to use.

Perhaps be able to extract the Tiling and Offset values out of a Texture2D node so if you wanted one master set you can, or use multiple ones?