Martin,
"""""""""But the transfer from 2D drafting to 3D still seems alien to me, now if MoI can fix that, I will truly have it all.""""""""""""""

I dont want to be insulting or overly simplistic with something you may already know, but had this input for this.

In poly modeling apps, the design is looked at more from a whole, and the model constructed as itself. For the NURBS construction, you'll want to visualize the piece in it's "underlying shapes" and stick those together. So, intersecting 2 sphere's and booling them together with a fillet at the join will produce a blobby metaball (The polymodeler would have made one object and manipulated it's center)

Envisioning those pieces "before" you model the part is the key to starting.