Hi Phil, just some additional info on this one part:

you wrote:
> I also tried exporting this Cylinder as an LWO and using the MOI
> with Normals lwo import script listed on the MOI3D Resources web
> page, and it too creates a faceted cylinder upon import.

Actually what happens there is the normals are loaded (as long as you had welding turned off), and are actually used in the 3D realtime view in Blender which will have a non-faceted cylinder in it - don't get confused with Gouraud shading artifacts which are a different realtime rendering thing.

But if you then try to render it with Blender's default render engine, the renderer apparently decides to ignore the vertex normals that are present in the model and instead calculates new ones (which will be greatly degraded for CAD data) just for the rendering.

I actually didn't realize there was this bad problem with the Blender render engine until just now. I don't know why it does that, it is really annoying. Please don't use it as a model of how vertex normals should be handled, it's really very messed up.

Here for example I've found a post of someone mentioning this same problem:
http://geheim.blender.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=13141&view=next&sid=41ba63d8dcc1ad464905c435d109c552

If you use a different render engine in Blender than the default one, or probably if you export your model, those good normals can probably get used. Anthony who wrote that LWO importer was using the Sunflow renderer, which ended up using the good normals, here is his original post about it:
http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=979.1

- Michael