I've had huge issues converting models to/from the Ogre format. Its been an enormous inconvenience, and looking around the forums it seems as if others have had issues as well. I would, then, humbly request that support be added to Ogre to load the most common industry standard model formats. Using (for example) Assimp (http://assimp.sourceforge.net/) is pretty straightforward and easy, and it would allow Ogre to load a huge variety of model formats.
That's my 2¢.
