Yes, I'd say give that a try, it is easier to make progress on each of those pieces.

You will end up with a different problem later on where the pieces will probably not be totally smooth where they touch each other, but I think you'll be better off.

One thing that might work fairly well for you is a kind of hybrid MoI / polygon approach - if you can draw different pieces in MoI and surface them, then you could export that to a polygon mesh modeler and then work on connecting up all the polygons and smoothing them out there.

- Michael