Josh is a huge advocate for hard ops & box cutter. He has extensive tuts for them and he talks about them at every opportunity. My concern is for topology. Those things tend to leave lots of n-gons laying around. The decals for the decal maker do too, but apparently the decals operate differently? Not sure. Josh says the topology doesn't matter with them as long as the polys are planar. Aside from seeing that I can probably make some decals and I have use for them in my own work, I'm not sure how what they do to the topology of the finished model. There is also some weirdness with the uv mapping for the decals. If anybody knows, I'd love to hear more. Otherwise, I'll have to do a little more research on that.