> But if you have a triangle mesh, then you only have a triangle mesh. If 
> you subdivide it, you now have only the new, higher-resolution mesh; you 
> have lost the original.

No you don't.  After you've seen the Blender video you will see what I mean. 
The original data is always kept, and you can still edit it while the 
subdivided triangle mesh is updated in real time.

> 10 years ago I used a couple of editors that would let you do things like 
> move several points at once, or have a "magnet" feature where nearby 
> points were sort of "pulled" towards where you're clicking, but the basic 
> problem is that it's almost impossible to make anything good out of 
> straight lines.

You use those "basic" tools to edit the original low resolution triangle 
mesh.  BTW in most packages you can at least select by vertex, edge or face, 
and of course multi-select, then the obvious scale/rotate/move, also you can 
extrude from faces and edges plus numerous more functions I haven't used. 
The tools are designed *for* people to edit triangle meshes as their job, 
once you've learned how it works you can do things quickly.

> For all the wizzy features of those editors of old, even creating an 
> object as trivial as a banana was impossibly difficult.

It just took me about 1 minute to make a simple banana shape in Blender. 
Blender even gives you a box to start with, so I just rotated the top face a 
bit, scaled it down and extruded, then repeated 5 or 6 times.  See attached 
result - it's not hard, that model has ~2500 triangles and I can easily edit 
the original triangle mesh (40 vertices) if I want to change the shape.  If 
I was going to do a big render I could knock up the number of triangles with 
a click of the mouse, yet the original triangle mesh is still there to be 
modified.

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