Today’s demanding applications in chemical manufacturing, energy generation and storage, pollution abatement, and health care are driving development of new materials with catalytic and optoelectronic functionalities. However, to predict and control the properties of such materials, scientists have been studying their development process at a molecular level. Frequently, a detailed understanding is impeded by the presence of a complex and poorly defined soup of spectator molecules that complicate interpretation of experimental results and make high-level theoretical modeling difficult.