@justin--on the rezzing optimization, actually we would really prefer to have more control from the content side. I think the nearer concept is very simplistic and the visitors would benefit significantly if the content creators could prioritize the prims that get sent to the viewer. So we might actually want to rezz the walls and work our way in and then rezz close details in a sim like Greenies. We might even want to have content rezzing delays or more properties about how things are rezzed (ie alpha up, glow for a few secs etc).

We are hoping to implement the new stable release next week so looking forward to new features/fixes!

On the region sizes, i think it is first just an conceptual relief that size doesn't matter ;p . But also the main point is about server resources being optimized rather than little region boxes. In fact my observation is that you can have tons of regions on a sim and it only really matters how many people, doing what. So again, a new way of looking at virtual space.