To Catia or not Catia?

To use Catia to create the surfaces of my monocoque or not? That is the question.

I'm banging my head against the wall. I understand that I'm an amateur and I'm not a trained, professional Catia Surface Engineer, but seriously, I'm getting pretty repeatedly frustrated.

I think I did a nice job on this, but I still have clearly not class A surfaces

This situation is essentially repeating itself over and over again, and really slowing me down. I remember reading on a forum that your surfaces are only as good as the quality of your curves. My curves are clearly not good enough. I don't seem to have the skill at this point to make everything gel using the methods I'm using at the moment.

I don't doubt using Catia for parametric part design of stuff like the damper I did before, or the brakes, engine, the list goes on and on. Also, I'll need to have everything in Catia in order to convert my parts to use in CAM. (of course I don't have to, but I want to, this is my Catia learning project). Plus, assembly design in Catia? Brilliant.

But I jealously look at what people do in other programs, and provide excellent tutorials like this one:

http://www.3dm3.com/tutorials/lightwave/gp2_modeling/

or

http://www.cgarena.com/freestuff/tutorials/max/formula1/formula1.html

or this (wow!)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MGtNt3e2hCk&feature=related

So, the question becomes, if my method is really difficult to learn, and not yielding results, how about changing it? For lack of a more scientific word, I want to make the airbox pretty. Some of the parts of this car require to the millimeter precision, like the tires and breaks. Some of them don't, they just have to look right. It's hard to make them look right the way that I'm doing things in Catia right now.

What program to use? I've seen some awesome, truly stunning models in Autodesk Maya, Autodesk 3ds and Lightwave. But these are all polygon models. I'll have a hard time importing those surfaces into Catia and physically make something out of them. From what I understand, I want NURBS surfaces, and it's going to take some hardcore software to create them and then export them in a format that I can import into Catia without losing a ton of quality. First choice would seem to be ICEM Surf. Dassault Systemes bought them and integrated some of the functionality into Catia. But I think I might be going in circles using ICEM, because I'm already having problems with this in Catia. So the other logical choice is Autodesk Alias. We'll see. At the moment, I'm leaning towards trying to learn box modeling in Maya since there are such detailed tutorials on youtube.