Blender 2.71 is out and available for download. The good news is that my patch to fix the problems with the space transforms was accepted and is included in the new binary FBX exporter. The bad new is that a later change broke it, so that only the root node has the space transform baked in. For simple meshes that are attached to the root node that may be fine, but on models with a more complicated hierarchy this means that the problem has now moved to the first child node of the model root.

I submitted a patch to fix this but it probably missed the deadline for the 2.71 release. I’ll try to get it accepted into Blender 2.72, but I’ll probably have to provide another option to support people who rely on the 2.71 behaviour.

At the moment Blender crashes when called from Unity3D but I haven’t worked out if the problem lies in a change in Blender or Unity. Running the Unity export script from the command line works fine, so it may be some problem with the way Unity launches Blender. The automatic pipeline still uses the Ascii exporter, so it doesn’t benefit from the fix anyway.

Update: It looks like the crash in Unity3D is related to a Python/MSVC problem. I attached WinDbg and was just about to open a bug, but it is already being looked at:
https://developer.blender.org/T40907
Updating the DLL fixes the crash for me.