Glad you like it
However, I must tress out that the v1.19 branch will not be maintained forever: all will depend on how difficult it will prove (read: how much time will be required) to backport the future mandatory changes to the viewer (such as when LL will make changes to the messaging protocol between the viewer and the server, or for example, when they will drop the textures based map support in favour of the HTTP maps, etc...).
My aim is mainly to provide, for as long as possible, people using "old" computers with a viewer which can actually run on their machine and provide them with an enjoyable SL (or OpenSim) experience. As time passes, less and less "old computers" (those machines with single core CPUs and old graphic cards) will be left, and then it will be time to drop the v1.19 branch as the benefits will no more overweight the efforts required to maintain it.
I'll give it a look as it should not be hard to backport.
Yes, this is too much work as it involves deep changes to the rendering engine... beside, the benefits are not so large, as long as you keep the maximum draw distance below reasonable limits for your computer and graphic card performances (128m or less is usually more than enough and adequate).
This feature has already been implemented in the Cool SL Viewerv1.19.0.5 release 58 (see the announcements forum, please)...