A good deal of the building process is subjective - depends on how much you know, what you're building, how you go about scripting and texturing - but the decision process on these matters can be daunting when you're still wrestling with much of the basics as I am.
I've read Chosen Few's authoritative stickie on texturing and I believe there is a location for testing scripts but I wonder if there is some means by which a dumbass like myself can get an objective summary or validation of an object's efficiency with a view to, say, slimming down the scripting, perhaps reducing texture size, eliminating unnecessary primitives?
We can check web sites this way, using Jigsaw for coding or WebXact for accessibility, and perhaps I'm dreaming but I think a similar system for builders and developers would help trim a good deal of the lag out of SL.