What I did was create a bunch of overlapping triangle meshes, set them to passable and have them follow the player's camera. Using the wireframe material has them only draw the edges, and that seems to take far less time to draw than the draw commands I was using. Also, using the fog feels like cheating after writing that article ... but it helps fill out the color in the distance without all the extra vertices, and you can't really tell.

Getting it to look right is more time consuming, just because I am using such a different way of rendering a similar effect. I have several such wireframe meshes that surround the player right now, and they each have around 1200 vertices. So I could add quite a few more to get a better looking effect. It's just a lot of tweaking now...