Hi Matt,
thank you very much, it is great that you work on OCIO and PBR workflow. I am also curious about the mysterious TG5 R&D
I was thinking on the feature wishlist in my head, and the main areas I feel could profit from improvements IMHO are:
a) UX
b) scene assembly & external asset support
c) viewport "smoothness"
d) documentation and ease of access.
Since TG uses unique, progressive viewport rendering that is view-dependent, and relies almost 100% on procedural content generation, I would use these "limitations" as advantage, namely:
a) Why not progressively render large .objs with no maps, a bit of UE5 style, virtualizing assets (like the terrain is, auto-LODing? on-the-fly?) If not possible to do streaming large objects, cache it once in the BG, autosaving results in a TG edible format (I think Clarisse does the similar thing).
b) Why not give an option to stream populated object at runtime without full import + maybe low-poly proxy for preview purposes (it is imported only for the preview, .tgd are simple ASCII plain text files)? It would be good to have the materials of external assets auto update if that asset changes (polygons do update).
c) Why not cache already generated viewport preview (pixels mapped to a sphere with certain resolution), so that the user has faster feedback (cached content can be marked greyish to indicate possible inaccuracy and rendered as an underlay)?
d) maybe drop Mac support at all? What is the user base here? For small dev team I can imagine how costly it can be to maintain the project, double the dependency hell. Besides, Apple will be replacing Intel CPU with their own making in the coming years, so I guess even harder to maintain cross-platform interoperability.
These are some ideas which you might find helpful, maybe some of these are already somewhere, still learning this great soft.
Best regards