Hi David, have you looked into alternatives to 3DGS like https://meshsplatting.github.io/ that promise better results and faster training?

I have. Personally, I'm a big fan of hybrid representations like this. An underlying mesh helps with relighting, deformation, and effective editing operations (a mesh is a sparse node graph for an otherwise unstructured set of data).

However, surface-based constraints can prevent thin surfaces (hair/fur) from reconstructing as well as vanilla 3DGS. It might also inhibit certain reflections and transparency from being reconstructed as accurately.