Yeah, it most certainly can be simplified, I used 24 parallax planes for demonstration purposes On the other hand, if the material editor had a for loop, the whole left side of the graph would be 3 nodes, as it's iterating the same process
I think SSR may be the reason it doesn't look glossy enough. SSR look quite bad on large flat reflective surfaces (because most of what should be reflected is outside the frame). Try putting Planar reflections instead. That way you'll be able to reflect what's outside of your frame. Furthermore, I'd add a faint, noisy…
This looks very promising! Would love to see a bigger shot of the shadergraph in order to try to understand it better, even if its beyond my comprehenssion :)