storing blend files

[surreal prawn]

having the blend file inside your unity project doesn't give you a performance hit. when Unity sees that the file has been modified since it was last imported, it will simply re-import the file. this process achieves exactly the same thing that an fbx export from Blender does, it just simply automates it - this is why you indeed need to have Blender installed, because Unity is using Blender to export the blend file to fbx.