The Animal Farm Research

Here's a brief summary of various programs I've been trying to use to generate AO maps:

faogen: Costs money. Seems pretty reliable and pretty fast. But, against, costs money.

Blender: Er, wouldn't load the .obj file I tried to throw at it, which started things off in exactly the wrong way. Not sure if there's a way to output AO maps... can't find an option in this interface of theirs.

Melody: Stops responding when you do anything. Stops responding when the screensaver starts. Stops responding when the wind blows. Takes a ridiculously long time. It's an nVidia tool, and I'm running on nVidia hardware, so I can't imagine why it's so fragile.

GPU MeshMapper: Surprisingly good. Free, clean interface, works quickly. Requires that I generate a normal map as well, so I can't get reliable timing information from it, which is a bit of a downer. But very fast and good quality results.

Why is it so hard to find anything good?