First off im not bashing you, I just think you may have made some booboos..

Two to three hundred thousand tris? It's probably more around the 4k-8k mark in tris and 2k-4k polys( two triangles together) for base character models. I to, am from the game industry and that number thrown out there was very outlandish.

Here is a picture of a car from gt5 which is supposedly using 200,000 polygons in its models.

http://www.wallpaperez.net/wallpaper/games/Gran-Turismo-5-1405.jpg

I think it would be entirely possible for Blizzard to give the character models a bump up of 1000 polys and still be able to maintain the wide compatibility that WoW offers. Honestly they could probably use less then that to fill out the silhouettes better and just increase the texture size for certain parts of the models. Boots in particular come to mind when thinking about stretched out textures (or bad UV mapping). They look so muddy compare to newer stuff we're seeing like the helms and shoulders.

Honestly I'd really like blizzard to put some effort in a couple more base boot, leg, robe and glove models for the designers to choose from when creating the new gear. Honestly when you think about it, new Tier gear for one character is this.. [2 new models (Head & shoulders) and then just reskinning for the base models that have been there since Vanilla]

The building rendering issue is easily remedied by making clip textures the engine shouldn't render past which is what older fps games like Quake and Half-life have done when designing levels. Basically behind your wall or around a corner you have a special invisible wall with a texture flag (clip) that lets the engine know not to render past this point unless the user has crossed this line, thus limiting what the user is seeing past that point which doesn't matter since they are seeing a solid wall in front of them or a corner of the hallway.

This usually works pretty well except for the fact that Dalaran is viewable at all angles from users on the ground and flying around. You can tell they obviously used a similar function to break up the sewers and top side.

For the original person that asked the question about not connecting in Dal, I have found that certain mods can really mess up your ability to log on in the city. A big one being Questhelper. I always make sure to turn it off if I'm logging into Dal. Questhelper and Dalaran do not get along.

Sorry I kind of got sidetracked a bit and went off on a tangent.

Anyways take care,