Splats to meshes is an isosurface extraction problem, fundamentally. It's one of the great unsolved problems of computer graphics and having a good general algorithm would have massive ripple effects for any problem involving meshes.

It's a rabbit hole and I only really understood it when I realized that the minimum time between any GH committer's hobby example and implementing the 2003 state-of-the-art is ~4 years.

Fingers crossed that Gaussian Splatting makes the rewards high enough that resources get poured on this.