Houdini has it's own scripting language. And several different modes of processing data. It has way more depth than substance designer. But it's designed as a general purpose 3d tool unlike substance which has a focus on texturing.
Many things are becoming node based. Blender has geometry nodes. There's node based material editors for unity and unreal. Many companies are using Houdini to create assets and in other areas of their pipeline. And of course a lot of places use substance designer and substance painter. So I'd try to get used to it.
It depends on how you think about this. In many cases a texture is just a substitute for not enough polygons. If you can draw enough polygons you wouldn't need texture information. For example if you're making sci-fi panels you could just model all the screws and panels in 3d and bake it to a texture later. So to create…
I'm familiar enough with the geometry bits in houdini, I've just not used it for texture generation. Where designer falls down for me is a lack of flexibility in terms of passing data around a graph and it's inability to deal with high resolution images - this is my fault for doing stupid things with it tbf - but I'd be…