blender's "set smooth"/"set solid" can be used to set the smooth flag for level geometry faces.
and there is support for substitute objects now. substitute objects won't get exported as mdl, they just place the mdl file which gets specified with the custom string property "substitute" in the $$m file. this can be useful if you want to place an animated character in the level for example. you would export it separately first and then place it using a substitute object (which can be the character model itself of course).
