>>42054165That one does make sense: it was faster to load the assets they needed for the area all at once rather than go searching through larger collections of assets for the individual pieces, and games don't use volumetric models like engineering does just the outer shell so it's not actually that much extra data. Is it inefficient use of space? Yes, definitely, but given how slow these games load and how much less of an issue storage space is compared to back in the day it's far from the worst design choice they've made.
As for accessing shiny models separate from normal models taking more time, that's incorrect. Memory is no longer restricted to sequential access, they don't have to go through the normal models to get to the shiny ones, just say go fetch the shiny one or go fetch the normal one. Either way, depending on how they organize their files and the architecture of both their engine and the switch's memory management system, it could take longer to say go fetch this model from where models are stored, then go fetch this texture from where textures are stored. On the same storage one call will always be faster than 2, especially when you're reading the same amount of data either way.
