Thanks for your comment, Brian. I think where Pixologic (makers of Zbrush) is particularly good at is hiding complexity, establishing robust defaults and yup – incredible speed optimization. The whole program seems to be coded in quite unusual ways. One aspect of this is, that Zbrush doesn’t utilize the graphics card at – it runs entirely from the CPU. That’s why they can be quite bold in their hardware recommendations…
That being said – there’s other programs with similar remeshers which reach very good results as well, such as 3DCoat. The process runs slower and requires more skillful users for good results, but it’s clearly usable. 3DCoat’s implementation is at least in parts based on the papers used in McNeels Create Quad Mesh Plugin.
What I can see here is certainly not missing skill. But papers which describe general principles and programmers with little time for an experimental side-project, who lack the knowledge what a useful software-implementation could even look like. Pixologic obviously sits in a very different niche and they know that remeshing problem quite a bit better.
Obviously I wasn’t asking for a similar Mesher built into Rhino 7. I rather wanted to invite you to think about possible new roles of the mesher, inside a program which will at some point convert SubD geometry to Nurbs.
It would at least not take me long to find equally harsh statements as Gustavo’s by automotive surfacing specialists posting in this forum who don’t see any value in SubD as its Nurbs-converted output is bad beyond repair.