I'd *love* to see an import from Blender that would retain materials, not just textures (there's an exporter plug-in now for Blender to MDL7, which just retains textures). Sure, Blender has a bit of a learning curve...at first, but once you get the hang of it it's actually pretty fun to use. I won't lie and say that I'm an ace who knows everything about Blender, but what I've used so far--namely the modeling and texture applications, is fairly easy. If 3DGS could import with materials too, then I'd take the time to use them in Blender, instead of and/or in addition to textures.

My 2 cents.