Congrats
- and thanks for the web page kudos
Subdivisions are great for making smooth shapes out of simple geometry like this --- and that's actually a pretty neat way to make a saddle using only 4 verts in the base mesh.
I always model with an eye toward using quads. Subdivision operations tend to come out more favorably with quads, plus there are tools like select-loop and divide-loop that work only/best with quads. I make a point of removing all 5+ sided surfaces from a doc (in the odd event that any slip in there). While most apps handle 5+ sided geometry much better nowadays than they used to, I still feel safer sticking with quads/tris...