Hi Hangar18,
Render is a fancy word for display. When it comes to 3d graphics, rendering is taking the math and the numbers behind the scenes of an object, and calculating a 2d representation that gives the illusion of perspective (including lighting). There are different levels of rendering based on need for detail versus speed and performance. For a 3d engine that drives the display of a game, the rendering is pretty fast and not as detailed as the rendering would be for a movie. In 3d packages in general, when you render, you are making a picture of the 3d scene you created. This can be a tga, jpeg, bmp - whatever. You change various settings to control the realism or surrealism of the final output. If you were making a movie, you would render each frame one at a time with the objects in the scene transformed or animated in some way.
When playing a video game, there is a 3d engine that basically is handling the math to display the 3d images on your screen. This is actually relatively low level rendering to make sure the game is playable and there are tricks that can be added to give it the appearance of very high level rendering. Basically when using a 3d engine such as dark basic, you leave the rendering up to the engine. You want to import the model definition in the form of vertices, normals, textures etc - in the case of dark basic, this would be a d3d mesh file (direct x). You can use rendered images however, but don't confuse these with 3d objects that you create or import.
The "awkwardness" of a 3d package is relative. If one is not used to using a particular package, it can be awkward. Most people that have used Wings consistantly, for example, say that it is a very robust and easy to use modeling program. 3d modeling software have a lot of commonalities - the basics being primatives and manipulating the points that make up an object and having multiple views of that object.
Enjoy your day.