what aaron buckman wants from BIM

My name is Aaron Buckman. I'm in Arch 424, Spring 2010 BIM class. I am bringing to this class a limited computer experience but a willingness to put in the time. I have some experience with Rhino, Sketch-up, and the Adobe suite. I am hoping this class will serve as an opportunity for me to actually stick with Revit long enough to get some decent interface time so that I will no longer be hesitant to pick it up when I have to prepare final documents for a presentation. This seems to me to be its greatest gift to the designer-draftsman. It would be nice if I could get involved in a model building program that is more intuitive and easy to run than Sketch-up for the conceptual through schematic design phases, but i don't think that exists yet in one format. I am however excited to try the massing modeling tools incorporated into Revit to see if they compare. I know that we will be concentrating on Revit as the main focal point in our BIM process, but I was also hoping to further my total software tool box skillset by getting more familiar with Rhino, possibly importing some of the crazy boolean shape easily created in that program into Revit, maybe even incorporating Rhino's plug-in Grasshopper for the generation of some of those shapes. In addition I would like to get a basic introduction into exploring some of the environmental modeling programs such as Ecotect and get a feel for how they could be integrated into the my design decision process, either in my next studio or later in the real world.