Thanks for the info, I just realized that Blender plays around with a bounding box as well if you go and subsurf your model. It appears to be a way to still edit an object despite the fact that it's poly count is too high to micro-manage directly.

Houdini might have an alternate modeling feature as well. I haven't really put much time into Wings or Houdini, I just remember trying to convert a file to obj through Wings and it imported far too small. Attempting to scale to 'BB" I was bit lost because I didn't know how to scale the BB itself.