Any idea where this skin is from? (HELP!)

As we've seen with shapes, many people don't entirely understand what looking good means.

I agree with that, completely, if you are running the default (and many of the other) Windlight settings.

I agree with most of that too. The only thing that is vague is the "marked improvement" part. What exactly is the improvement?

I know that facelights mask over the poor shading of polygons by shining light on the head from various angles. I can accomplish the same thing more effectively with Windlight without attaching a prim dependant resource hog to my avatar, and it covers the entire body from any camera angle.

Anything, ANYTHING you do to an avatar texture within SL or the client messes with the natural distribution of light, dark, and color value of the original texture (simple brightness and contrast differences applied to RGB). SL has nothing dynamic going on in the baking process. Everything you see with face lights and Windlight skews the original texture information in the same way brightness and contrast do in pre-CS2 Photoshop. The only thing that happens is a loss of information as the histogram is clipped. Luckily, skins are very forgiving because most of the color values occur in the mid tone region, unless it is a very light or dark skin.

There are Windlight settings that preserve the values of the original textures far more closely than were ever possible under the old environmental settings because we now have better control over gamma, color shift, and throttling of other control values under Windlight. That, to me, is the only improvement I've been able to benefit from under the current version of Windlight for avatar textures.