hardsurfaces take a while to be done in any case. I suggest to start with sculpt to see a fast preview of the shape, than go back to to subd for make it clean ( Im not a big fan of polishing too much the sculpt model) cheers.
Umm, I think we probably have different ideas of what a sub-d friendly mesh is in that case. Being all quads isn't it, perhaps if the goal is to sculpt on it in zbrush. However, if you're doing hardsurface work, a sub-d friendly mesh would be a mesh with the minimum amount of geometry placed in the right spots to make it…
1 - The key is to clearly separate design tasks from execution tasks. Any workflow that does not take this difference into account is bound to be inefficient. 2 - You *should* get into sculpting, but not with the hope of producing "clay" hardsurface models that can compare to traditionally modeled hard surface models,…