For those interested, version 3.0 of KotorBlender is out. ASCII MDL / PTH workflow has been dropped in favor of binary importer & exporter. Binary MDL support is mostly on par with MDLops/MDLedit, except it lacks smoothing groups and cannot export saber meshes.
I will fix these as I go. Other plans include streamlining the editing process, e.g. one-click lightmap baking and working with multi-material objects, armature animation export, advanced shader node setups, etc.
Also, an interesting discovery I made about the MDL format - both MDLops and MDLedit expect per-vertex "tangent space" data to have the following layout: Bx By Bz Tx Ty Tz Nx Ny Nz, where B is a bitangent, T is a tangent and N is a normal. However, my experiments show that "tangent space" is actually a transposed TBN matrix, which makes a lot more sense from the engine standpoint: Tx Bx Nx Ty By Ny Tz Bz Nz.