Know what i would like to see?

[Baker]

Ranger is saying Half-Life development is so easily even complete newbies can do it with the greatest of ease and with more creative freedom than the Quake palette and does not involve conversion plug-ins that don't always work or are somewhat non-newbie friendly to setup.

A super nooblerized NetRadiant or QER that was knobster easy to setup with Quake BSP 2.0 support (more colors, extra hulls, the stuff that Spirit would like, ...)

Still that misses the model thing. Admittedly I've never used Blender and leileilol's tutorial combined (but in my limited time playing with modelling, I wasn't immediately comfortable with Blender ... probably takes doing a few tutorials to warm up to it). Even then Q1 format is 256 color locked. IQM may have steep requirements incompatible with some engine goals. Etc. Etc.

[Spike]

[Ranger366]

[Rich]

[jim]

[horrorporn]

[Boss429]

[Electro]

[Tomaz]

[ceriux]

[Spike]

[frag.machine]

[Tomaz]

[Spike]

There is some contention over the actual hull sizes. If you use the hull sizes suggested by halflife, you end up with floating players. If you offset the hull size, then many quake mods 'just work', even though the offset is not compatible with halflife mods, which can get messy. you still need mods to use it properly, and it still needs tracebox.
from memory, halflife 'only adds' contents (removed=unused=reserved), and they're just fluid movement directions. gamecode can query that using pointcontents with no other engine modifications. I think.
FTE does load texture wads. From memory, DP only loads them if they're within a different subdirectory from halflife (which may be an issue for mapping tools), or I might be confusing that with ezquake.

[ceriux]

personally i think external wad support can be done with out. cause the texture can be compiled directly into the map.