For shadows it's also a probelm with AAA games in fact.

in last 3D games : NeverWinterNights 2 , Gothic 3 etc ...
shadows can completly slow down the game.

after that there is also optimisations for shadows only big AAA companies that have dedicaced programmers to that.

some games uses LOD for shadows , or only activate them if close enought, or sometimes use projection texture to fake static shadows,
even Doom3 have real shadows on only few and nerest elements of rooms :
just turn out lightmapping ot see it

well , shadows eneabled and coded standard non optimised : all people know and i've tested on other engines or technic demos : shadows drop the frame rate
easily.

look at last showcase on Ogre3D forum : a user is creating optimised versions of shadows and faked ones (like planar only and others).

No for me seeing all running fast smoothly (animated characters, shaders , physics , particle effects) together showed me Ogre3D potential.

even BV engine and it's demo with some physics , no animated characters run really slow compared that engine.

Well , i stop here ; i can just say , frame rate was great on my PC compared to some other stuff and other comparable simple demos.
the editors are not really complete indeed
(try RTS demo and press the key to go in editor mode , or run the Exe of the editor and you will be able to visualise the ressources ( pics, particle effects etc .. )in cool panels )
But the base seems really good with all that stuff : shaders , physics,particles

Now the price is too hight indeed and for non commercial use : i don't see the interest if you can't even make a simple shareware

I stop here , let's see in 6 months the future of the engine if it continues to be developped and the pricing , demos and games ....