I am actually quite familiar with these concepts - I have an ACS in Digital Multimedia... Unfortunately this never made me a good modeler.

Other than that I have a good background in level design... I've designed levels as far back as the original Doom, and subsequently quake, counterstrike and doom 3.

At any rate, A6 is a different ballpark and for the type of project I want to move forward with, I need to have a world fully implemented with models and no BSP-based geometry at all. This sort of throws anything I know about level design (other than theory and basic concepts) out the window, since all editors I've worked with in the past (a4 included) had a similar setup.

So for now I'll be working with MED until someone chimes in with some suggestions on what 3rd party software I should consider using. Whatever I'm learning now will benefit me either way (helps to know MED).