Michael,
Now I'm working on product design we creates design prototypes for real pistols.
The forms are very organic especially on plastic parts of guns on handles, I use SubD for this and some times have problems where for example I can not set precise fillet or create precise Picatinny Rail that is organically inbuilt in organic body. It is real problems. My colleague use Alias and prepare my models for production adding precision etc. And I must say hi works super fast may be a bit slower than I. Even though Alias is not so good in parametric and he works like in MoI where he collapse all history to avoid breaking up model. So I just want to say that if you understood how Surface modeling works it is not so hard to use it. Basically for me was very hard to dig into SubD I spend about 1 year till I totally dig into it. But Surface modeling is more natural and close for me, because I started from MoI and spend a lot of times doing organic stuff with MoI exaggerating Loft. And still some times SuD looks for me a bit foreign even though I use them more than Nurbs.
I think if you add some tangentcy to tools it will be big step forward.