Hi Martin, sorry I didn't really know these would have helped you at that time, I guess I was focused on the part of your request about doing separate meshing settings for each individual object which is not covered by what I'm describing here.
Sorry for making this topic hazier than it needs to be, and thanks for trying to help.
For now I'm moving on. I resorted to asking the engineer to re-export the file in a better way. So, I'm good on this job.