I would think Wings is as easy as anything. You're basically importing splines and converting to polys which has a tendency to get messy. I'd set it up to get as low a poly count as you can while keeping the shape of the text. That way you have less work sorting out the mesh. Once you're happy with the layout of the polys select all of the front and back faces and hit L. This will select all the edges that define the edges so that you can bevel, extrude or whatever to set the hardness after smoothing. - Baz