Hi, Roygee.  Good to hear from someone proficient with Hexagon giving their perspective.  I'm glad to hear I wasn't alone in my assessment of the extrusion tools in Hexagon.  I'm sure, with practice, it could become an art in itself to use that particular tool, but honestly, making just regular, straight extrusions from selected faces without scaling or insetting should be much much easier if the software is to be used in serious workflows.  I did find that the "Extrude Surface" tool does have an "Axial" extrude option, which is what I really wanted from it, but I found no easy way to set that as the default mode for the tool.  So Instead, you have to really practice, and practice, to master the way it works, which is very annoying in my opinion, and less than acceptable function for such a common modelling procedure.  I did find where the tessellation option was located for the cube primitive, which did indeed help to speed up the process, and brought the modelling time of this tutorial down to about 1 minute.  Still, having to manually select all the faces was the true deal breaker in terms of speed, compared to Blender or 3dsmax.  Also, once you extruded the center faces inward, and then used the "Average Weld" to weld the points together, it didn't maintain the face selections, so you had to go around the object once more, to re-select, and delete those faces, eating up a lot of time.

Anyway, all in all, Hexagon is an ok modeller.  It really could benefit from some more attention in the programming dept, but I guess that ship has sailed.  About the question regarding Ruled Surface, Coons, and Gordons, check out B Surfaces in Blender.  You need to enable the addon in preferences, but it allows you to do some great things with strokes and splines for building geometry, etc.

http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Dev:Ref/Release_Notes/2.64/Bsurfaces_1.5

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Tools :  3dsmax 2015, Daz Studio 4.6, PoserPro 2012, Blender v2.74

System: Pentium QuadCore i7, under Win 8, GeForce GTX 780 / 2GB GPU.