one hour later...... w00t!!! I have a fantastic low poly version that is flawless. I took the yingyang curve, lofted it as a polygon, merged vertices so it had no seams, subdivided it then moved vertices around to make it look smoother (couldn't just increase the divisions for the loft because it only goes up to 10 for some strange reason and Polygons>Smooth would not have given good results), then extruded the top edges around the perimiter several times to create a beveled look, snapped various vertices together, merged vertices, then finally tweaked the normals to finish it off. whew.....

Here it is... polygon version is ok, right? lol