that sounds like a viable alternative , uhm testing
my mesh chunker I determined that it is better to
have entities merged to reduce the amount of entities
than it is to have several entities as separate models.

I think you could most likely see a nice increase in
fps and decrease in memory by merging some clusters of entities ,either pre modeled as clusters or merged at runtime ,if you haven't done so already .

the mesh splitter I am working on for my projects should be useful
for large models that needs to be split into smaller
models , for instance static models over the triangle limit
could be split into separate models which conforms
to the limit, or large worlds into smaller chunks ..

I did not look in to this yet but I was thinking switching skins based on distance too ,however
I have no idea how that would impact performance ,negative or positive ..