I have found very interesting that we had to bake the noise texture in order to get higher contrasting noise. I wonder is this potentially a bug in cycles or not?
I tried to google the problem but I could not find any relevant info. 
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I think, because of the randomness of noise. With baking the randomness is frozen. Still random!
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The issue with the edge detect node, and creating that look is that at a micro level, everything is just a shade of grey, by baking the information, that gets turned into a usable map that has specific value on specific pixels.
It’s a bit like seeing an object from far away and it looks like a flat color, but up close you can see its an intricate pattern of a huge range of colors. Getting that wore edge look seems to work best when you have a texture map you can use, if you just take the output of that edge detect node and try to use it as a mask between, say a metal shader and a paint shader, all those various levels of grey just dont have enough contrast, even though it look like it shold work in the viewport. But that map can be used instead, even adjusted with a color ramp to increase the contrast further and it works perfectly.
I hope that clears things up. I dont think its a bug in cycles, but the inclusion of a node that baked a shader down within the node tree would be really great to avoid having to bake this info out.
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