I'm a little late to the draw on this part of the discussion, but regarding the "remodeling from the ground up" statements that's still going around when referencing the car models - I never really quite bought that. A lot of the cars that have been unveiled are the exact same models that were new for GT6, and some particular LMP and GT3 (R18, 908, SLS GT3, GT-R GT3) cars especially indicate that there's some re-use of material going on. And now I've just seen the Audi Quatro make a surprise appearance, and while I'm excited AF to see it in there, I'm pretty sure it's the exact model used in GT6. I just struggle to believe every car was really rebuilt completely from scratch with all the apparent carry-overs, and odd lack of updated race machinery.
Here's my theories:
1. PD carried over some of the newer material from the last game. They mentioned several times in the GT6 era that content was being developed to be "future proof", with their adaptive tesselation algorithms and extra-high poly count models - it's not hard to believe that some stuff could in fact have been developed for both games/eras simultaneously.
2. PD indeed scrapped all the 3D/mesh models from the PS3 era, but still had source material/scans/photos they could easily re-reference, and rebuilt the more recent vehicles without having scout out and rescan the cars again.
3. Everything was scrapped (models and reference material), but licensing contracts (some or all) were still in place, so some cars from the past game(s) were re-referenced+scanned.
I'm not really upset that this is being done, rather I'm just really wary about the sort-of-dishonesty going on here with one of their more heavily touted statements (and I'd like some more up-to-date LMP cars).