Have you tried using Eevee for shader adjustments? A pretty common workflow is get your lighting setup working with Eevee and then switch to Cycles for the final render.
You can get the difference between the surface normal and the bevel normal and use that as a "sharpness" value to mask things like wear on the corners of objects
> A pretty common workflow is get your lighting setup working
Don't think that's common at all because that won't always work well. The difference between Cycles and Eevee is the lightning, materials, rasterization (compared to raytracing that Cycles does) and such.
The GP is correct in many cases. Part of the reason Eevee was created was for this exact purpose. You can't preview certain shader nodes (though you can preview most of them), and you can't preview raycast-only effects like indirect lighting (unless you bake it) and certain volumetric effects. But you can preview your geometry and direct lighting and physically-based materials well enough to get an idea of how things will look, and then you can make a final pass where you preview the actual Cycles output.
If you're fixing your UVs, or adjusting the depth of a bump effect, or arranging a scene to see how objects' colors balance with each other, or tweaking the metal-ness of a material, Eevee works great as a preview even if your final render will be in Cycles. Eevee is particularly useful when working on an isolated object (minimal indirect lighting), vs seeing how an entire scene gets lit.
