This past summer from around Aug 19 through Sept 20 I worked steadily on Saber Thing focusing on reducing frame rate drops and the user experience.  I was also experimenting with a way to build characters that can be animated and also obey the rigidbody physics and cuttable behavior.  I haven't implemented them yet but I'm laying the groundwork for them to exist some day in the near future.

updates since Aug 18:

aug 19: heat disp opt, mass tweaks, force impulse (later removed), floor opt
aug 20: *meshcut instances now being tracked, fixing a memory leak type situation
-fix heat/disp glitch
aug 21: refining meshcutinstance
aug 22: disabled boxblast, less aggressive overzealous cutting
aug 23: frustum optimized heatchecks, saber event manager updates, experimenting with a "fast normalize" algorithm
aug 24: sabercut shader opt
aug 25: metallic workflow shaders
aug 26: displacement normal switch to raycast normal which looks better
fixed capping
aug 27: shader displacement to replace mesh displacement
aug 28: shader displacement pretty successful
aug 29: ***backside blade burns! 
hot vert mapping optimization on cuttable burns
aug 30: cuttable burn optimization
sept 2: displacements more consistent
sept 3: rigthing magnet tweak
sept 4: sabercut shader distance
sept 5: cuttable burn list faster than arrays
sept 6: procedural noise to replace grunge map on cut faces, managing burns, cuttable arrays revert
sept 7: refined procedures, tweak force pull
sept 8 - 11: shader tweaks
sept 20: BIG : fixed missing shadow update after vert displacement