Normal aligned 3DGS was already proposed earlier[1]. This seems more like an iteration on getting performance improvement by moving from the theoretical principle closer to what the hardware is already doing well and finding a sweet spot of brute amount of features, fast rasterization method and perceived image quality.

It's already noticeable that there doesn't seem to be one fits all approach. Volumetric feathered features like clouds will not profit much from triangle representation vs high visual frequency features.

There are various avenues for speeding up rendering and improving 3d performance of 3DGS.

it's surely a very interesting research space to watch.

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.20593

https://speedysplat.github.io/

another venue is increasing the complexity of the gradient function like applying Gabor filters

https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.11003

some many ways to adapt and extend on the 3dgs principles.