Thanks Drac for the heads-up on this potential problem with Bryce5.5! This would greatly concern me because I often import Wings models into Bryce5 without bothering to UV map them. It's so easy for me to save all the faces on a model into separate materials groups and texture them all in Bryce. This works on all simple models and some complex ones as well.
Would I be able to save a scene with several Wings-made models textured in Bryce as a Bryce 5.0 file and then import it into 5.5 with the material groups intact? Unless this, or some other workaround, such as a patch, make model import as easy as it was in 5.0, I see no reason to switch at this point.