hey RV (took me ages to find this thread lol, I really need a memory) think I seen the thing you was on about vis sapling, but I cant get access to the particle system if I add leaves in sapling (help lol) "my" way of weight painting works ok but is tedious(little bit of ocd helps) but has the advantage of letting you decide where fruit dead leaves etc go (got to admit here I can crash blender 10+ times per day) rofl. Have you tried using the skin modifier to make a tree?? is good for trunk ~ major branches would get a touch tedious after that but then u can drop to particles or dupliverts?

And what we really really need is leaves, lots an lots of leaves, most 3d trees I look at are 1 tex on 10,000 leaves(even with random scales) a real tree with "only" 10,000 leaves would have 10,000 textures, yeah I know we couldn't have that many textures but particles lets you add groups so a group of ten (?) would give good random patterns add that to randm scale an the tree wil look more real!!

so I am "collecting" leaves, scanning (huge- aiming for 4096 min @300dpi ) be fun if you do same wiv yer upside down leaves, gumtrees dont grow round here lol, we could do swopsies ;-)