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.  It would take longer to do that than what it would be worth.

I don't think it would be needed to a great extent. All I'm saying is that there may be corner cases (no pun intended) where some manual tweaking will be necessary for optimal results. I'm sure we'll find some good strategies that will work most of the time, though. For example, if you're rendering an urban scene with lots of architecture and other background objects, you could turn all smoothing (per-vertex normals as well as polygon subdivision) off by default and only activate it selectively for a few foreground figures and objects if you find that they have problems with their shading. Or you could let the exporter guess and make a correction or two if it guesses wrong.

-- I'm not mad at you, just Westphalian.