I guess that military helicopter you referred to was the model I am working on. And, I would like to say that I prefer to use several polygon and nurbs objects/curves/lines/surfaces.

Although the model I make may seem like one or just a few objects, it may well consist of a HUGE amount of objects. Using the boolean ops for polygons is nice, as I tent to believe I save some face count on more complex parts (by the union of many parts into one object).