Cycles is texture stretching and not applying scale correctly I've been wrestling with this for hours now, so I've finally succumbed to posting for help.
What I'm trying to do seems simple enough - I want to create a texture that I can use in various different geometries in my scene with a consistent scale, rotation, location etc.
I've searched all the avenues I can think of for similar posts, but nothing seems to solve my problem.
I'll illustrate it below.







So it was suggested on one post I read to use the mapping coordinates node, but I've played around with it in multiple different ways, and it doesn't seem to achieve what I'm after, and I believe it is actually a problem with the geometry, as I will illustrate below.

I created a few different cubes, and have applied smart-uv's, and applied scale, loc and rot to them in various intervals to show what I think the problem is. 





As you can see from the images above, applying scale etc doesn't seem to effect the size of the texture EVEN after resetting and redoing the smart-uv's.

The following few images just show what the result of changing the mapping vector is (Edit: I couldn't attach all of them sadly, but I did try almost all the options available on blender). Again no success. 
I've also tried changing the image texture from 'flat' to 'box' - again to no avail.



Any help would be massively appreciated. I'm hoping that I've just missed something obvious!

Many thanks in advance,

Chester

EDIT: 
Here is how it looks with the texture coordinates and mapping node. All the objects that it is applied to have had their scales etc applied and all UV maps deleted.





I've created another scene, with a new material and the problem is the same. Very odd.
Try connecting your texture coordinates node to the mapping node like below. Then you dont need to worry about UV's at all.