I agree with you pappenheimer.

the most important thing of a good grass system is the management of the visibility in order to keep the performance up. no developer can afford to loose gpu/cpu capacity for one object-set...

the trick is not to make good looking gras, the trick is to make the good looking gras usable for wide areas without loosing to much fps...

and as good as grass'o'matic 3 looks, i bet you, if you provide me with your graphics-files i can deliver you exactly the same scene around 75% faster...