Well guys, I recently downloaded the latest version of Sketchup, and to my surprise, it is 1000 times better.
Now instead of having to fight with the troubles of converting .dae to .blend, you can go straight from Sketchup into .3ds, .obj, and a few other formats.
They have really cleaned up the interface, and I think it will make all of our modding projects a lot easier.
I wanted to pass it along, especially for those like me who have had all kinds of issues with the .dae format.
So anyways, happy farming everyone.