You can stop the simulation at any frame in the timeline you wish and then even apply the modifier to make the heap permanent.
Then you have a regular mesh you can just export to any other 3D software.
I would recommend for linux the latest devel build, and for win / mac the “release” builds, the win graphicall build should be matching the one from the dfvfx website.
And well, regarding cell fracture, you can use the standard “viewport rigidbody” procedure there, as in fracturing your object and making each and every one of it an active rigidbody (after one of them is active “Copy to selected” helps there to apply this to all others… or just select all beforehand and make them active in 1 go ) or just make a bunch of bowling pins rigidbodies (without fracturing) and then you can simulate this in a similar way.
But… you have a lot of individual objects to handle, for very high object counts blender becomes more and more unresponsive. In the FM (Fracture Modifier) its all inside one object, sim is a bit faster, and cached playback is faster in general there too. Its just a question of better performance and easier workflow, which the modifier provides.
And the FM can interact with other modifiers, so in the bowling pin example i just used 3 Array modifiers and an FM to set this up. Else you would need a couple of individual objects to achieve the same effect.
The Fracture Modifier is completely cool… is Blender the same, otherwise? Should I keep two versions?
Do you know if there’s a way to fracture only part of an object, for example, the corner of a cube?
How exactly are you doing the bowling pin thing? Is there a tutorial? (Haven’t used Blender much so I’m not really familiar with a lot of the terminology…)
As the FM build bases directly on 2.78a, you dont need to keep the official 2.78a around, the FM build should provide exact the same functionality plus the FM of course
To have smaller shards at certain locations, you could for example use … a smaller object which carries some particles, put this (and possibly even more such particle objects) into a group, assign it as “Extra Group” to the FM and activate “Extra Particles” in the Advanced Fracture Settings, Fracture Point Source. (you can shift click to activate multiple). The FM helper addon can automate this a bit, if you have an active object with FM on it and select one or more other objects, you can turn them into helper objects with one click (they have particles then and belong to the FM extra group then).
Alternatively you could use the vertices as pointsource to via Extra Verts.
And another cool thing (via the addon) is mouse based fracture. Just have an active object with FM, and activating the addon operator will allow you to click and drag some helper objects interactively.
The bowling pin thing is just 3 Array modifiers stacked on top of each other plus an FM below them. Then you need to disable ALL fracture point sources (yes, disable “Uniform” too, shift click) and the FM will detect any incoming mesh islands (as in each bowling pin) as shard and use it appropriately.
Well and for a couple of FM specific tutorials (and test videos), see here https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLyWdRVpqt5ZdQ6SdPuLQ76nShiuwXu_uC especially Video 12, the “Fracture Modifier Introduction” should cover a lot of basics (though its from 2014, its still valid… and watch it compeletely, its 50 minutes but absolutely worth it )
To create rubble even easier (and not dealing with many objects in the 1st place, but keeping all 1 object) you could use the Fracture Modifier Build. 
