Quote - I'll admit, since i do almost all architectural scenes, this worries me if per-object tweaking is needed to any great extent.  I'm not sure i want to have to edit all objects in Urban Sprawl 2, for example.

No, that's unrealistic of course. There are ways, the problem is just to find the most reliable and most elegant way to do it. The solution I suggest is to take the information where it already exists: In the Poser file. Poser knows if it should smooth or not, and how much; And Poser is very sensible to unwanted shading due to unwanted smoothing: Meshes which show clean in C4D look like crap in Poser.