As I mentioned on previous comments on this blog, and have babbled on about for years in Linden office hours, I think pre-cacheing is very interesting. My comments were generally rebuffed by LL staff at office hours as they were against the pure ethos of SL itself as a live streamed world.
Pre-cached specific areas on the client side ( bundled into the client ), or a way of ensuring complete download of a whole regions non changeable assets prior to the user experiencing them seems to be a logical way to radically improve first impression user experience.
Its clear to me from the media, and many experiences with first time users that they have no understanding or desire to understand SLs 'live streaming of a world' concept. They compare it, and will always compare it, directly to other similar experiences - which for them is games like Skyrim. Settings have no impact on solving this situation. They really will not care about settings below the top level of the UI, and even those they will expect to automatically optimise to deliver a good user experience. SL tries to do this, but its fundamental architecture cannot deliver it.
Of course, doing a pre-cache will reduce the possibility for the true full capabilities of SL in those situations. But a very small percentage of new users actually understand that SL can do this anyway.
The design of the client is starting to reveal capabilities gradually now as people move further in from new users, to intermediate to advanced. A move like pre-caching might allow this staged approach to happen across the whole architecture.
