Hi Rob, I'm not so sure about UV manipulation stuff - it may take quite a while before I will be able to focus on that, it can be a pretty big area of work.

However, I do plan on making at least some improvement in certain areas, like I want to "pack" the regular NURBS UV coordinates into sub regions of the texture rectangle, currently this is not so great where each surface of a solid gets UV coordinates that are overlapping over the same full texture region.

And yes as you have noticed the way that you construct an object will determine the UV structure of the surfaces that you create, and those surface UVs are what are directly used as the UV mapping when you export to polygons.

But the whole method of manipulating UVs tends to be an "advanced rendering" type area of work, in general it may be a while before advanced rendering tools like that kind of stuff become a focus area to be built into MoI. MoI is more primarily focused on the construction of geometry.

- Michael