I honestly dunno what he means by zero gravity smurf. If he somehow did true zero gravity then any unit would be able to go anywhere and construction of buildings would essentially be impossible. Not to mention the fact that your units would move around constantly because they would be "floating".
As for eating compute cycles because of a cloud layer, an extra 2 poly's from the plane with a regular linear offset texture on it wouldn't cause that much of a difference. And its just my opinion but part of the effect that I go for in my work is the atmosphere, which is why I wanted to figure out a good way to do something along those lines. As for upping the game to 90 fps, I dunno how you can tell the difference. The average person can't tell any difference after between 40-60 fps because the human eye can't react that fast. (learned that in my animation class last semester thank you very much
)
As for gideon's level of humility, it doesn't help when your forum is full of people who call you a god when you add in a building that is 2000 polygons.