why scaling it down in blitz3d doesn't have the same effect is puzzling
If the modelling program doesn't show the errors you see in Blitz, then the modelling program also cannot scale these errors.
If you loaded the model into Blitz and it has visual errors, then scaling it will also scale the errors.
Then after zooming in (scaling everything in Blitz) will show the same errors as the ones you were seeing when you didn't scale the models.
It's just like having a number in a certain programming language (float) with 50 digits (behind the comma), e.g.: 1.12345678901234567890...
If you divided that very accurate number by 100, it will now have also 50 digits, where the last 2 digits are gone, which isn't that bad, because the number is too accurate to visually show a difference.
Let's take a number with only 2 digits (in a certain language which isn't as accurate as the other one): 100.23
Divide this by 100 and keep the number of digits, then this will become 1.00.
Here you see that you've caused a significant error.
So your modelling program could be able to store vertex positions and other stuff more accurately then Blitz, that's why scaling (and viewing) the model in the modeler doesn't show such errors.