Quite interesting how diverse the expectations are, that people have in SL. To me "back to the roots" means among other things, that the common user can share a similar experience as the building and scripting pro. To me collaboration is the key figure for SL, not buying and selling. Although I would not want talented people to be stopped making incredible things, I see a certain danger to the original idea of SL if the gap between the different user skills is getting wider and wider, until nothing a new user makes can compete at all with what s/he meets inworld. I do not have a patented solution to this problem, but certainly viewer embedded tools help closing the gap rather than more and more things that can only be achieved by outworld programs. Tricky thing actually.
My comment on using Google SketchUp for making meshes has disappeared. Why?
Someone suggested that program is worthless for making meshes for SL although it supports Collada. Why?
That person said, those meshes would cause more lag than "optimized" meshes made in other programs. Why? SketchUp so far is my only hope to get into the league of mesh makers. Blender is far too not-self-explaining to me! Do not tell me SketchUp can't be used!