Yes, this is for blender
I want to have the capability of modeling terrain and analyzing lines of sight- it could be very useful for work...
A few years ago I was able to download a 90MB grey scale image of an island - once I had that it was just a 2 minute task in blender to turn that into a 3d model that was quite detailed.
The discussion link you gave was broken, but I am fairly certain I have read it... I think it was written before the USGS changed its available download formats.
I will try microdem again, but when I installed it, it told me I was missing a bunch of files that it needed and just crashed...
It is stunning to me that the USGS makes doing this so complicated!