Blender is wonderful. I would do most of your meshes in Blender 2.69 and If you have $349 buy 3-d Coat. You’ll save a ton of time on retopolgy. I think with the two you’ll get around some of the FBX import issues and be able to have really beautiful meshes that have all the trimmings and fixings right out of the box. Watch Master Xeon’s tutorial on how to concept a Robot in Blender. He talks for an hour about workflow as he models using sculpture mode and retopologizes the mesh.