From the last post you quoted, for reference:
Additionally, enabling alpha cutout has a non-trivial performance cost on mobile platforms. We - intentionally! - do not change the render mode of specific objects based on the contents of the texture, so this would require an additional property for the MeshPart to explicitly enable this mode for meshes that need it.
Something that I’d like clarified is whether the performance impact is due to the proposed auto-detection of alpha transparency mode or the cutout rendering itself.
For what my speculation is worth, I suspect that zeux was actually referring to the process of automatically selecting a transparency mode - which I’d like to clarify I’m not suggesting in this feature request. The automatic selection of a transparency mode would likely cause other frustrations other than performance, anyways, and I can see where the performance overhead comes in with auto-selection.
I can’t imagine that the actual cutout rendering would be costly if the automatic selection was removed - after all, as many people have correctly pointed out in those other feature request threads, there are heaps of examples of cutout rendering being applied in lower end scenarios.
Most notably, the feature is present in ancient game engines which were designed to run on potatoes (by current standards). The mobile devices we have today would almost certainly run any of those older game engines smoothly, given those engines run smoothly for the high-end computers of their days.
Of course, I could be wrong! I’m open to that possibility - but I think we really need some clarification about what exactly the performance killer would be.
I’m willing to drop some of the extra parts of this feature request w.r.t mesh parts if they’re deemed too expensive to render on lower end devices (specifically the Translucent option), but as long as the cutout rendering isn’t that expensive, I still don’t see any reason why it shouldn’t be implemented 