Hi Michael,

You can tell that I was introduced to 3D design through SketchUp. ;-)
I see what you mean. I'm tending to gear surface creation towards rendering, which looks at things superficially.

It's just a fun to create the whole shape of objects and the inner-workings of a model, and there are times when that's the goal of a design, but there's usually a cost with memory and manipulation speed associated.
I also run into problems when trying to give thickness to surfaces to make thin-walled elements. The same type of problems associated with fillet where sharp angles, space constraints and funny edges can trip up the Shell and Offset commands.

I'm hoping the normals issue is what gives me odd-colored or odd-reflective objects in my Kerkythea renderings. Must be either that or some type of object duplication, as it will produce the same error in different rendering modes.
MoI cannot currently show the direction of the normals, but if I could find the switch in Kerkythea that enables both sides, that would not be an issue. I see where you can choose both sides in the emission parameter but I have the feeling that Kerhythea enables both sides to start with.
...challenge.

On the note of surface matching: ;-)
So! Do you think we may see a slightly enhanced Blend tool someday?
One that will blend across the edges containing multiple curve segments and even intersections?
One that will blend between not only two, but 3 or 4 individual edges with options for tangent types on each edge?
Sorry, thought I'd plug that one again. Seems to be something I end up wishing for at some point in every model.

Thanks for the good explanation on solids and open surfaces!