@ Ghostwriter: I had no serious problems in creating, skinning and animating nice humanoid models in MED. The 6-sided mapping uses a simple but effective method of projecting the 3D-body to a plane. This will of course result in some distorted faces, but you can compensate this, by dragging the vertices in the skin editor. Most often however you will accept some little distortions for the benefit of triangles that touch each other. You can later paint over the edges, which is often desired.
There are many different model editors, but for me it is more important to be 100 % familiar with one program, than having tried them all.
MED would be my first choice for the obvious advantage that it is (and will be in the future) fully compabible with the leveleditor. It has a workflow and philosophy that is similar, that makes it more easy to switch between these applications (something that I do very often).
So my advice would be: try MED first, and if you don´t like it, and if you have reason to believe, that another program can fasten your work or improve your work in a significant way, try something else.