There's a really aggravating reality when modeling something that's real (or something that everybody super duper recognizes).

It's the fact that you have to get the dang thing correct down to some pretty severe details.  Another perfect example is to model a real car.  There are a LOT of curves and shapes in a car and people know them in their heads.  Another way to say it is that people can look at a model and know if it's right or not.  They may not know what exactly is wrong with it but they know it's not right.

I don't think you can use a poly modeler to get really good results for objects which have components where the curves are important.  Details for fillets or chamfers and straight parts cutting into curved parts need to be done really well for a good model.

I think nurbs can serve those purposes easier than poly modeling.  I'm not saying poly can't do stuff but I think nurbs can do curvy or complex shapes easier.  It's really clear when I finished up the secondary hull on this model.  I told Amapi how tight I wanted the mesh and it provided me a product which had gobs of detail where things changed angles a lot and less detail where it didn't and bang, perfect!

You can do that in poly but you have to work at it harder to get it to look good.  Plus I just cannot figure out how to draw nice even clean smooth profiles in Hex for curves and such (can it even do that?).  It seems like you have to put in vertices for every single thing.  I haven't tried it yet so I'm really overstepping my bounds here.  Someday, I'll dig into it.  Bottom line, I don't know how to draw a nice smooth even curve in Hex and have the surface flow out of it like you can in the spline modeler or like you can in Amapi.

Need more vertices?  Just up the settings and whap, it's all taken care of and you didn't have to manage the mesh at all.  That's beauty to me!  Expressing a model in terms of surfaces rather than mesh is far more dynamic for my modeling thinking process.  It's truly a personal limitation for me which is aggravating.

-Kix