Why thank you Michael! I had no clue those options were hiding out there in the INI file (probably should have looked, but just wasn't nosy enough this time). As for the explanations of exactly what those options are doing, that really makes sense. I had noticed a "floor," shall we say, of where "avoid smaller" seemed to do much; now I know why!

As for my contorting of the mesher, I'm fully aware that it isn't built with this kind of thought process in mind. As I noted in my opening post, this kind of workflow just doesn't seem to be too "popular" (if that's even something you could use to describe it). I do think that some of my thoughts on tweaks from this post might be of some use; not magic bullets, but just some generalized cleanup. I can continue to use scripts in Modo to do some of it, but MoI could use the fact it has the real surface info to make those T-junction loops of "close but not quite" welds lie on the surface where they should.

But, yes, to make a mesher perform more for this kind of mindset would require a totally new mesher. That's more or less what this post was talking about; that is really just a thought experiment more than anything. (And please don't take offense to me referring back to my posts; I really DID post up a giant wall of text.)

The MoI mesher is GREAT at what it is intended to do. Leagues better than any other I've used. Which I think is why I found I could bend it to my needs so well. ^_^ If you ever write a mesher that takes this kind of mindset into account, I'd love that. But, even so, the current model scratches my itch with pretty good deft, so I'm already quite happy.