i've never encountered any such conversion/ingame problems with blender, and i've used it for ages. the normals flipping thing only seems to occur if a fairly complex object is not quite solid, or if it has certain geometry errors all of which should be fixed anyway.
it's very good for fine control of meshes, and it has nearly all the tools of one of the more powerful tools, but practically no texturing capabilities. but for texturing, it's best to use TS or Lith, since you won't run into as many problems with textures not appearing or going crazy etc.
it's main drawback is the lack of an undo button and the learning curve, but if you follow Max Sterlings fighter creation tutorial on FS Watch, then you definitly get the basics of it.
overall it all comes down to personal taste i guess, but it's performed very, very well for me for about as long as i've used it. it's great as a basic mesh editor, and from there you can import the mesh as a dfx into your texturer of choice (though i find it works best with TS, and then TS with Lith for fighters & bombers)
i've had FAR more trouble with TS when texturing a single model than i've had in total with blender.
