I would not call it cheating 
, but rather using appropriate modeling techniques. It’s a common practice in Class-A surface modeling to follow two main rules that I also did in this example:
-
Refit the majority of trimmed surfaces (wherever possible) so that they will no longer be trimmed, hence they will offer as clean edges as possible. That will eventually let the adjacent surfaces to be simpler, too;
-
Align the direction of the edges, in order to achieve a more natural flow of the reflections.
I get your idea and in some complex scenarios it’s really like what you have mentioned, but the best Class-A designers always refit the primary surfaces and keep the original ones in a hidden layer. That forces them to spend a lot more time into adjusting the individual Bezier patches in comparison to the quick but sometimes lower quality use of multi-span surfaces.
By the way, you will notice that your small rectangular surface on the top edge can’t be aligned to the adjacent surfaces with the necessary precision, but (here is the funny thing) if you use Match surface with the “Refine match” option to add extra spans, you can actually achieve far better flow across the surfaces in that particular area. This is one of those examples where a multi-span surface can offer better quality while also being super fast to apply. However, all pedantic Class-A gurus will consider this “a bad modeling”, because they can’t stand any surface with more than 36 control points (6x6), so they would split the said surface into 4 smaller ones and then will struggle for a long time to achieve G2 continuity across all of them.
P.S. Do you mind if I post these two videos in the Rhinoceros CAD 3D group on Facebook?