Here is my latest attempt at better trees. Still clinging to the idea of using something free, I am trying out the M-Tree add-on. This seems to work well. There are some issues I have yet to overcome though. For one, the trees cannot be appended to another scene. There must be a way to convert these to standard geometry.
I’m liking the new trees. I’ve never used that addon but the result is nice.
These are much better than the others. However, even though they do become real geometry in the file they are created in, they do not appear to be exportable to anything but OBJ. The resulting OBJ imports bog a the scene down to an unusable state. 
Perhaps the trees should be their own work in progress at this point. Here is another one. I believe I have overcome some of the exporting and appending difficulties I was having with trees created with MTree.
