Staying flexible in the level of detail? I'm building a simple scene with lots of cylinders (tubes) that I might want to 3d-print later on. Now I'm wondering how to retain some flexibility when it comes to the resolution, i.e. the number of vertices used to construct one cylinder.
If I use to many, the performance suffers and if I use to few, it might not be possible to easily recover the roundness later on after I used boolean modifiers, I guess.

What's the usual process with Blender and what do you recommend?
While you're indecisive regarding the required resolution of your mesh you could use a sub division surface modifier



On cylinders you would need to add support loops to avoid distorsion of the mesh. You could can be add the support loops by selecting both edge-rings and bevel (Shift-B). Alternatively to the support loops you could try an Edge split modifier