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vesemas228,
I hear you, but that's what optimization entails. A game engine is just that: an engine. You can't simply make everything run faster. In order to get more power in one area, you have to take it away from another. There is no perfect answer -- it's a great balancing act. And the more complex the engine, the more moving parts. The more moving parts, the more chances for something to go wrong.
I'll say that in 1.04-, pop-in was still there, but
much less frequent. The game also used to crash, hang, and stutter like crazy for a lot of users. My guess is that the pop-in developed from an effort to stabilize the procedural generation of new areas/objects/NPCs. Now, they probably can't fix it without re-introducing the instability.
I've never experienced any problems with the in-game graphics options. They have all worked for me since release. To this day, I must run Fullscreen, in-game Vsync ON, Frame Limit at 60, or I receive terrible stuttering.
Many changes were made to mip-mapping, AA, and ambient occlusion since release. Most of them improvements, as far as I can see on my screen. Although, that's always subjective. I noticed great improvement in performance with Nvidia HBAO+ over time. AA became much sharper. And I used to run with anisotropic filtering at 16x in Nvidia control panel. The distant textures used to be so muddy. Now, they look plenty good enough for me using default, in-game mipmaps. Got a few more FPS there, to boot.
For you last paragraph, do try the TextureMemoryBudget tweak. Works great here. When, not if, the pop-in starts going haywire despite the tweak, it will get worse and worse as you move about. I just quicksave and reload, and that always seems to clear it up for me.