LWO imports fine. The vertex normals come in properly as well. If there is a vertex normal map, Modo, correctly, ignores the material's smoothing options, so I don't understand the previous comment. You don't have to worry about smoothing. Scaling is spot on as well.

MoI Style = Named Material poly group in Modo. Don't worry too much about object names. They will be given a separate mesh item in modo but will all be grouped under a group with the name of the imported lwo file.

You can change the materials in Modo to anything you want as long as you keep the Name. Because Modo allows Nesting, you could have a style in Moi called RED, for example. On import to Modo, a Polygon Tag called RED is created with a material in it. You can then nest below Red any material you like, say Black Plastic, as long as it is a child of RED. Pull all these materials corresponding to MoIs styles out of the group with the name of the mesh, then delete the group. I have attached a screen shot of how the shader tree should look (this is from my Canon A1 model that I put in the gallery yesterday).

The big, big, advantage of Modo's shader tree approach is when you want to change your model in MOI and re-import to Modo. Just save out the new MoI mesh as an Lwo file (overwrite the old one is easiest). Open your old file in Modo. In the ITEM tab, delete the ITEM group containing your old mesh. Import your new LWO mesh. This will create the item group again. Switch to the SHADER tab. All the materials you set up previously are still there. There will be a new group with the name of the mesh. just delete it and all your materials are reapplied to the new mesh automatically. If you created any new styles in Moi after the first import, pull them out of the group before you delete it (if you look at the materials in the group before you delete it, all the ones you already have will have (2) at the end of the name. Any that don't are new.)

It sound complicated but it isn't. 3 clicks to update. 1) Delete old item group 2) import new mesh 2) delete imported material group. That's it.

C4D on the other hand is much more complicated as the materials are attached to each mesh item so when you reimport you have a lot of work to sort out which material is which.

Copying a UV map when you re-import in Modo can be done but it is a bit advanced and not intuitive. Stick to non-UV mapping if you can as these are carried from one mesh to another with the material unlike UV maps which are mesh specific.