>> If you already have your shape in the proper form you should turn the smooth modifier off so that it does not modify the shape of your object by shrinking it down.

True, but then, curved surface will starting to look faceted.



This work pretty well on 'cubic' kind of shape


>> But I see now that one of my assumptions of how ZBrush worked was wrong - I just assumed that as you painted it would automatically subdivide polygons down as needed to get more detail in a small localized area (maybe there is an option to enable this?)

Zbrush and Mudbox allow this, to do local subdivision ... but it's not an automatic process. You have to select an area and then subdivide it.


Well I was also miss understanding what you where all trying do here :P
But yes, actually if you only use the meshing tool to create dense enough models, this should work pretty well for some light sculpting work, no matter if there are triangles or not. For me using zbrush = subdivide you model in zbrush, so I was a little bit surprised by the discussion.