Illustration 7-  But, since those artifacts have always been associated with bad/inverted normals or other mesh concerns, was my "fix" just a result of the bad normals being absent?  In other words, was this just a correlation and not, as it would appear, a causation?  Apparently, not in this specific case.

Cylinder A) Original Cylinder, Not Remapped, Normals Imported
Cylinder B) Original Cylinder, Remapped (FLAT Projection), Normals Imported

What is happening here?

1. An object with normals reversed improperly resulting in backfacing polys in Poser will cause the face to "disappear."  That much is obvious and well known.

2. However, that does not, necessarily, result in the "ripping" effect we see in smooth shading on the object.  As we can see in Illustration 7, a properly projected UVMap will "fix" that problem in this case even if there are backfacing polygons present.  Moreover, implied by Illustration 5, it doesn't necessarily matter what condition the UVMap was in as far as this artifact effect is concerned - Only that it was the proper projection choice for that object.

3. In the case of the original object, as demonstrated in Illustration 8 below, a "Box Projection" was the worst choice possible out of all possible "primative" UV Projection Maps.  That, obviously, made it appear as if the inverted normal was the issue.  But, it was not.  The issue was the projection choice and not the inverted normal.  As we can see in Illustration 6, there are no unexpected artifacts and, what's more, the only artifacts apparent are small, blurry, "smoothing" artifacts on the edge where the inverted-normal-polygon joins with the flat top of the cylinder.  Why are there unexpected artifacts there?  Because, smoothing is determined by the vertice normals and those are a function of the average of the face normals for faces that connect to them.  It would be understandable for those vertice normals, and hence the smoothing, to be somewhat confused or distorted.  Those are "expected" artifacts due to the normals issue and the smoothing angle, IMO.  "Unexpected" artifacts like the ripping effect we witnessed are now no longer "unexpected."  They're a choice of a bad projection choice hence, they are now "expected" for this type of object. 

Not every object is the same, obviously.  Your results may differ from object to object.  **The most important point here is that the projection method you use when first projecting a UVMap does make more of a difference than just a matter of convenience when beginning to UVMap. ** It CAN affect "ripping" artifacts in your model both in Preview mode and in the final Firefly render in Poser.