> Thanks for pointing out that #2 is just the way the surfaces are
> displayed. So now I know to trust the curves for the best representation
> of the surfaces I'm creating.

Yeah, the curves are drawn to a high degree of accuracy, they are dynamically adjusted to fit smoothly to your current view. So that's exactly right, you can really trust the curve display (including edge curves) a lot.

But this is prohibitively expensive to do for surface shading, so surfaces get just one static display mesh that is used at all zoom levels. This causes these kinds of artifacts which you kind of learn to ignore over time.

However, sometimes there are mesh shading artifacts that can be an indication of problems, this tends to be sort of undulations in the shading in an area that you thought should be nice and smooth, sometimes this will show you that there are unwanted ripples in a surface. But this type of artifact looks different than the jaggedy edge type.

Later on you can export your model using a high mesh density to get rid of these jagged edges in your final output model. In fact it is probably not a bad idea to every once in a while do a test mesh export, and set the mesh export display to shaded, so you can view what your higher density final mesh is going to look like and if it looks nice and clean or not.

One other note - it is good to make sure surfaces join together because joined surfaces makes for shared edges between surfaces, and shared edges between surfaces are necessary to get "watertight" matching meshing for each different surface along that common edge. If you try to export separate non-joined surfaces they can have slightly different mesh structures along their sides which causes little tiny cracks between them. But shared, joined edges have extra processing done on them to avoid this.

- Michael