Maybe not the right location for this topic but anyway.

I come from a Pro-E background and have yet to find a good way to do top down modeling using a master model. 

What I have tried is this: 

1. Created my master model as a multi body part.  Started with surfaces in the part then eventually made each part a solid body

2. Improrted this part into a new body and deleted the extra bodies, in some cases I also imported surfaces, axis, planes etc that would be needed for reference

Sounds simple enough however I have some major issues with this

1. When I update the master the Body-delete feature often fails and I have to go and re-select one or more of the 10 bodies to delete. Extremely frustrating and time cosuming

2. File size seems very large, probably due to importing the entire part and then deleting all the bodies.

3. Get alot of crashes when going in to re-define the delete body feature.

Has anyone figured out how to make this work efficiently?  Any tips or tricks?

Thanks