“would only help with the general orientation, but not neccessarily with the quality of the mesh surface?”
Tell me if wrong, but intention of such markers is only to aid photo Alignment where ‘natural’ features are few or ambiguous. At a push, such markers could not just ‘aid’ but could be solely responsible for photo Alignment!
Then, once the photos are Aligned, the x + y + z sparse cloud created for Alignment purpose is almost abandoned by RC, and the ‘blobby white’ model is created by the following Reconstruction process, which does it all over again but on a x + y + depth map basis.
So, if that’s correct, it’s not right to expect either the sparse cloud or any markers to ‘help … with the quality of the mesh surface’?
The aim is to achieve photo alignment by any devious means possible, so then the real work of Reconstruction can happen.
And also of course, the photos’ images can be fine for the texturing, even if they were majorly inadequate in features for Alignment.