, you are a God amongst men. A GOD!!!
As for optimizing the steps, I will reiterate that I tried every possible method to limit the step size from using pixel depth to diminish steps in the distance to a combination of distance and tangents, and nothing gave me a better overall framerate than just a basic tangent calculation: product of camera vector and vertex normal. Unless you need more than 50-60 steps and running a mesh with more polygons than pixels (in which case, holy cow, just model it out or tessellate), any other method to limit steps was rendered moot by the additional instructions.