Unless you make your importer to split hard edges automatically, the Blender step is needed, otherwise the game will try smoothing edges which it should not.
A good AO map can hide smoothing errors to a certain degree. Moreover, I suspect the GR2 import process to split edges which are not contiguous in the UV map. Yet, splitting edges before import is still advisable.
Doing that manually in Wings would take ages. If you want to test your program on Wings3D object files I could import the models exported from Blender back in Wings and export them again. Problem is (don't ask me how/why) Wings' obj importer won't recognize edges split in Blender. It simply welds them back.
Something has changed either in Blender's obj exporter or in Wings's obj importer, because this problem started only a couple of years ago. If you prefer I can try installing some old version of either program, and see if I can bypass the problem.
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