Will there ever be a way to merge separate objects?

[Kyna689]

I've been editing away at a complex model and I had to do some subdivision when I was testing different materials groupings... but in the process I inadvertently separated more than I intended to. A few misclicks of "split all" on a late evening have led to thousands of separate objects being created. How in the world do I merge these back together once I've closed out of the "split objects" dialogue? I can't find any "merge selection" option outside of the immediate "you just split these from the parent object" dialogue box.

What options do we have here? And is there a way to knife geometry similar to how you can in Blender? I'm having a godawful time getting Blender to import my Keyshot model even though it's in .obj format. Errors left and right. And the material maps either aren't saved at all or I'm just too dense to figure out how to access them. Keyshot is way more friendly.

[LayC42]

IMHO it's not necessary to merge broken meshes, 'cause they're grouped in the scene tree. So you can apply a linked material to the top group and handle them like a solid mesh.

Hope that helps