Thanks everyone for all the help!

I'd always just turned off "Weld Vertices" because of a thread I read back when I started with MoI that said Blender really needed it turned off in order to help with the vertex normals. I hadn't "put two and two together," so to speak, and realized that this was where my current question was originating from.

I'll see what I can do about getting the developer for the OBJ import for Blender to address this problem. If nothing else, I'd like an answer as to why they're being ignored. My guess is that it's just easier to recalc the vertex normals rather than deal with the imported ones.

Cheers!