I'm looking forward to that future thread. Absorbing and integrating are good things.

By the way, if you'd like to have a play with an actual mesh and see if and how they implemented all that theoretical knowledge, I recommend Victoria 4 from DAZ. I think it's still free, and for once they did a relatively decent job with the topology. As male figures go, there's also Apollo Maximus. There may be other free models with good topology, but I'm mostly a Poser person, so that's all I know of.

Finally, if you enjoy watching the unwashed masses struggle: phantom3D and I both have WIP stuff in our file lockers here that you can download, and there are number of threads where we discuss them, although usually more focused on rigging and Poser-specific things and a little less on modeling.

-- I'm not mad at you, just Westphalian.