A long time ago, I stopped using the WED BSP mapping tools, and opted to make my maps with models. I felt like I had more control over things that way, and I think I had read somewhere that models were faster in the rendering pipeline. However, I started roughing out a level in WED recently, and I forgot how much I enjoyed working with it.

Is there any disadvantage I should know about using this before I go too far with it?

The only time BSP's gave me trouble was doing a stress test with a crazy amount of square blocks.....all with lightmaps ON, which gave me Out of Memory errors and an aborted build.

Once I turned lightmaps off, the level compiled fine and ran fine, which then you just have to deal with just monitoring how many triangles the BSP blocks add just like models.

I prefer level blocks when it comes to quickly creating large blocks or areas that need texture repetition, like a big building, a big wall, or a large floor. I dont want to have to unwrap a 3d model every time I want to create a new large surface. Also, blocks do not add to the entity count.

One of the big issues I had was I could never get specular/bump mapping to work on BSP blocks (I don't know a better name for these, but let me know if there is one) but I wanted my environments to have that look. I believe it is possible, so I am having another look at this.