I think the best thing about primitives is that they make the table angle independent. Using them, gone are the days of having to create graphics at the correct angles and have to recreate them just to get a different angle.
And Blender is very powerful (especially compared to the fact that it's free), but it's also non-standard in its use. Its interface was designed with efficiency in mind, not common practices. Once you get the hang of how it flows, you'll find that the way they do stuff is actually better.
Unfortunately, I have yet to successfully create something in Blender, export it as an .obj and have it work in VP (says there's an issue with normals). I've always had to follow Fuzzle's steps (save as an MS3D, then change the file type using Biturn).