Actually it's not, its just that it's the oldest open format, so most commercial software supports it at some level, (often as you noted at a very basic level) I think the most popular format for tranporting between high end 3D suites is DXF. And there are several other new formats on the rise which offer far more options then .obj. Collada, and u3d being two of the big up and comers. as far as the flash tute it requres the .xml and jscript stuff to run, get in contact with me by PM over at DAZ and I will see what I can do.