jenda224,
Ahh yes. I share your exact frustration. Stitch Edge is only really useful for (a) small parts and/or (b) parts which don't require any upstream changes. For large parts that have any upstream design changes, Stitch Edge gets (a) extremely time consuming and (b) unstable to use.
I'm not really sure what the "best" way to model ribs like this is, in NX Advanced Sim; what I've found is that using RBE's (ie: the 1D Connection, Edge-to-Face approach) is more robust to design changes than Stitch Edge.
Can you explain in more detail the "unite" function you have mentioned, in I-DEAS?
I do think that this is an area where the Advanced Simulation FEM preprocessor could be greatly improved.