It's true that quads are pairs of tris and handled that way at some level. But in a lot of software, what happens when you split quads into tris, it still doubles the effective (as opposed to actual) polycount. It can also do things to vertex and edge order on an .obj, so any morphs and things of that nature end up broken, and that means starting all over from square one.

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Barbequed Pixels?

Your friendly neighborhood Wings3D nut.
Also feel free to browse my freebies at ShareCG.
There might be something worth downloading.