Okay, I explain it more deeply for you: The advantage of static meshes in Torque Constructor, WED, Lawmaker or in the Irrlicht editor is: You can compile static shadow maps on top of the geometry. Every static mesh can cast and receive shadows (at least it should work like that, if the shadow compiler works properly and it does in all of the mentioned tools except of WED).
Now try that with models! It will not work in WED. You have to bake shadows in another application. And since MDL 7 does not support more than one uv-set you have to find external rendering helpers as well. If you bake everything into one texture then it will have very low resolution.
