Naturally a quad mesh is not intrinsically superior to triangles, but it does tend to make hand editing much easier. 
I agree with Götz that it would be interesting to compare a simplified RC triangle model to the sub-D surface from Z-Brush.
My general willingness to leave UV operations to other software comes down to two things:
- When RC computes a texture atlas, it doesn’t always use the available tile space well – which is a real problem when we need optimized tiles for real-time projects.
- I’ve seen RC generate non-manifold output, lamina faces (all vertices shared between two faces), and other kinds of geometry problems that causes other software to cough and sputter when edited a RC mesh.
Some of you may be tempted to repeat the oft-expressed idea that we are best off when we use software for its core strengths – and for RC, that of course is MVS, not unwrapping.