Buckyball

I've built a model of the Gold Dome for Google Earth.

I know sketchup is free, but it's free with many MANY limitations. I haven't used the pay-for-play version, but I feel I'm being hobbled by the lack of it. First off, building a dome was way more difficult than it needed to be. There's no way to make a sphere, so I had to build it in an offhand way. Also, there's a limitation on applying and positioning textures. In a decent 3D program, I would have made a sphere, cut down the polys, sliced it where I needed to and then laid a solid texture over the entire thing, keeping the polygons of the texture —as opposed to the model polygons— intact. The way I had to do it is apply a texture to each poly on my pieced-together dome, making it look not so great as it could have.
I know. I'm bitching about a free program. It's pretty good for free, but they want people to make content for them. I want to make content. But it's way harder than it needs to be and the results are lacking because of the limitations.
So I have three models awaiting review. I've had my OKCMOA model rejected for "Insufficient Texturing" which was wrong. The surfaces without textures had colors applied and didn't need a photo texture, which would have added to the size of the file. So I revisited the model and uploaded it again. It was rejected a second time for the same reason so I appealed and it is awaiting re-re-review at the moment. It seems it's someone at google looking at a number on a screen, not paying attention to how the model looks. It also seems that Google wants cubes with a photo slapped on it. I like to put some detail to it and don't want to half-ass a hundred cubes. I want to build as accurate a model as I can. Given the limitations of a free sketchup and model review prejudices... it just makes something frustrating out of something I do for fun.