Well you could included LOD’s, always best practice, but the problem of pushing polygons has been solved a log time ago even on older video cards. Rule of thumb these days is if an object needs to be smooth and round then make it smooth and round and key elements like heads should not look like they were bolted on with a wrench. In other words optimization is still good but over optimization is bad if talking about next Gen.
Would be nice though to have a complete overview or what forms of optimization is built into the engine as there is a lot of things that is now done in code that use to be done manually.
On the other side of the coin.
I’d be a bit more concerned about things like excessive draw calls as T&L hardware rendering is still a bit of a bottle neck but does tend to stand out if overuse is the causes but so far it “seems” to me that one would have to do something seriously wrong and abusive beyond the right amount of this an that.