Ma lighting is on their way to full controll of your lighting. With the new layer view they are getting close to Virtual Magic Sheet. I also like the "do it yourself" filosofy in effects. Instead of hundreds of canned effects you build your own from scratch in a very logical way. And you really only need 4-6 basic effects like dim, position, color, iris etc. Make as many  copies you like of these basic effects and modify them and even make some macros to do the work. Then it is up to you if you want to have 10 or 1.000 effects doing exactly what you want them to do.
There are a lot of predefined macros to speed up your programming as well. Download MA2 onPc and MA3d for free from malighting.com.