Something that I've started doing to accomodate those whom like close-up renders, and those making scenes with a lot of items is to make my meshes in two different levels of detail.

Low level of detail (low polygon count) for far away shots, and a higher level of detail for closeups.

Usually it's really not that much work to create the two levels of detail, especially when using smoothing levels in the modeller I use (hexagon). 

Same can be done with textures. Create a high resolution original, then make a reduced resolution version, to go with lower polycount meshes.

Hi, my namez: "NO, Bad Kitteh, NO!"  Whaz yurs?
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