I didn't see that anybody had solved the issue with importing .craft files into Blender on a Mac (due to some unicode jankiness), but I've made some progress.
What's currently working for me is the following:
At the top of part_dict.py, add:
import codecs
Then, on the (new) line 87, change:
f=open(os.path.join(path,cfg))
to:
f=codecs.open(os.path.join(path,cfg),"r","utf-8")
With that little change, I suddenly have my (poorly-designed) spacecraft imported into Blender! Now to learn Blender, and all its strange conventions...