I have to say that I am glad to learn that the sketchup devs do frequent this forum - as someone mentioned earlier this is severely lacking from the giants. The ultimate responsiveness would be the developers of Cockos Reaper (music production software). They are active on the forums and respond quite quickly in terms of developing features or at least explaining why they will be focusing on something more important. Suspect that this sort of answer would at least let Solo know when they might address this or if as suggested it is too big a task for the foreseeable future
Regarding blender, ah yes.......I have downloaded and installed and uninstalled. Did manage to follow a tutorial that allowed me to turn a sphere into a heart and then do a basic render.
Just that sketchup would introduce some decent animation path functionality. Took a look at Truespace (but since they no longer offer a format converter to bring in and export CAD friendly files.......) but man they have nice camera tools......