What's better, more unified models or more component based ones?

While working in Sketchup, I always avoided separate components as much as possible, don’t know why, I just did, perhaps I found it to be quicker if everything was inside one component. I did have different objects and copied them here and there, I didn’t model the same object a bunch of times over and over again, I just copied them, but I avoided creating new components in the hierarchy and always “exploded” them. Exploding is basically like joining components in Blender I think.

Anyway, modeling in Blender and similar programs is a whole different story and I am not sure how I should go about this, strive for as least components as possible or vice versa, most importantly, does it even matter?

For the start I want to create models for fun and import them into Cryengine, Unreal, Unity,etc and play around, but once I hopefully become better later, I’d like to try selling them, but I don’t know what’s preferred and how much it’s important or not. So what’s your opinion on this?

It doesn’t matter, as far as Blender goes. I’m sure there are issues with exporting to other platforms, but I personally don’t know what they might be.

Creating separate components for the sake of reuse is about the only thing that makes them practical, apart from easier modelling.

i judge the method to use by efficiency. which way is easier to edit? uses less geometry? can be bevelled nice? unwrapped easy? can i reuse parts? and so on…

many times i need to change the method in the middle of development.

i use sketchup 8 for most of my modelling drafts which i then import into blender by a customized OBJ importer. the obj gets imported into blender as a separate object for each “lose part”.