@kwistenbiebel said:
They might as well go fully open source with Sketchup, so really funky coding stuff can happen.
Amen to that! I was really hoping Google would step up to the plate with this release and show that they had some vision for the software, but version 7, although improved, is not a step towards something better. Google is content with having sketchup be purely a surface modeler with poor integration and inefficient load handling. I was hoping to see an indication with this release, that sketchup would move more towards a quad modeler or at least start to offer things like direct vertex manipulation and subdivision. There are so many great ruby scripts and ideas that could've been taken on by Google's development team and integrated into the software as standard tools, but in the end, there were no new tools whatsoever. Except for automatic line intersecting, which I'd imagine wouldn't take more than a few lines of code to add.
So, in the end, the only real solution to the inefficiency dilemma is to have solid third party application that can be strong in the areas that Sketchup is weak. I wouldn't count on Google to provide this solution.