Very nice, clean and precise work on the landing gear. I never felt comfortable with NURBS neither. Tools are not as user-friendly as for polygon modelling, and objects quickly get pretty heavy in terms of PC resources.
I never need to wash my hands of paint afterwards.
...and paints never dry up in the cans, and you never get short of any color as well...3D models don't break in a thousand pieces if you drop them, etc etc. And more-over, you can have them fly, burn or explode! And you even can fly them! ...but you can't touch them, that's the bad side.
About flying them: in flight sims, you can use LOD (level of detail) copies of a plane model. The game loads a very low poly version of your model when seen from a distance, and a more detailed version when seen from close. It also uses a high-resolution version of the cockpit for the plane you're flying, and a low-res version for the surrounding ones. This greatly helps saving resources. Also, textures are in compressed file formats like .dds which manages to handle a lot of information like color, bump, transparency, shininess etc.
I agree, maybe the most painful time you have when working on a model for video games, is the rigging. You need to set all axles at the correct place for every moving part to move properly, but also to individually set the X,Y and Z axis for every part. For instance, the Z axis must be inverted on ailerons if you want them to move 'one up and one down' when pushing the stick sideways.
I made only a few planes for flight sims, then I built cars for race sims. It's always been a great feeling to virtually 'take the wheel' of the cars I modelled.