Bob, I know what you mean with regard to the material assignment issue. I think it's something that they're trying to streamline; they've made a ton of progress with the usability of the U-V editor, but as far as I can tell, it's still not really integrated with the u-v settings and application in the materials area/button.
For now, though, if you don't have a texture u-v mapped onto the surface, it won't show in the 3D editor, even when textures are supposed to be showing. I hope they'll fix that, but in the current release, you have to be sure to use the u-v mapper/unwrapper in order to have textures show (without having to render every two minutes!).
The best approach I've found is to use the materials area simply to set up the texture and name it (or else it won't be available for use in the U-V editor's list--and it also won't export properly)--but I don't use the u-v tiling controls or much in the way of material settings there at all, since virtually none of that exports.
The other useful aspect of the materials editor is the vertex-group thingy, which I use for selecting and saving face-sets. Once I've set up a group of vertices/faces (e.g., NoseCone, or Fins, etc.), I can quickly select just those vertices, use the U-V unwrapper's excellent range of unwrapping modes, and then apply the texture I want via the U-V editor (and fine-tune it from there).
By using the "update automatically" in the U-V editor menu, I can see the texture/tiling changes on-the-fly; something that's critically important when you're trying to line up things like bands of rivets, ambient-occlusion sections, or faux-shiny edges that exist on the texture map but which aren't really there in the model itself.
I also take more care to NAME my materials carefully and efficiently--something I realized was REALLY important during our factory-repainting days!
