At last, some interest :)
Christoph, I agree with almost all your comments.

> - the most difficult thing is to find a compromise between universality
> and quality of the results...

It can be a sequential process. So that complexity will be added
step by step. The problem is to predict further improvements and
make development keeping it in mind so that in the future you won't
rewrite everything from scratch :)

> - script based plant systems are quite straight away and nice to use,
> you can implement interaction of the growth with the environment quite
> easily as well.  But they have one extremely weak point:  They are slow.

It's obvious. But I think you'll agree that when you have a solid
algoritms and data models in place it's just one step to its
implementation in any other language. One example - Tom-Tree and
POV-Tree. Scripting language is more convinient as a starting point
for prototyping, as a proof of concept.

> to be parsed in text form after that which takes time as well.  I tried
> it and a plant generator integrated into POV-Ray can be faster than
> parsing the plant mesh alone.

This is ideal variant. Unfortunately POV-Ray doesn't have plug-in
structure. Otherwise it could be just 'plant' plug-in. Right now
you have to write patch in C (or C++ ?) which is less common than
POV-Ray scripting for the majority of POV-Ray users.

So, if there is any interest I could share the main ideas for discussion.

Gena.

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