The skin shredding bug appears to be fixed, I've never had it happen since initially turning off Use External Binary Morph Targets (which also seems to be fixed in SR1).

That image was done with a bucket size of 8 - bucket size won't affect image quality at all, only how safe the image will be to render (smaller number = safer memory management).  As far as I can tell there is no impact on SPEED of render, so I don't see any reason not to set it pretty low (I usually set it to 8).

I have never bothered to down sample texture sizes and generally use very high-rez textures even for medium or long range shots.  Maybe that is sloppy and maybe I could save render time and/or memory if I used lower rez texures but I think that is now a moot point with P7+SR1 (assuming one of the OTHER bugs doesn't give you problems).  Since you already spent the money for P7 I think it will be worthwile to try it with SR1.  Note that you can always just do the great majority of your work in P6 and only use P7 for rendering ...

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