Rudegerus Osterham

This can happen a bunch of times. Relogging usually fixes it, especially if you see yourself fine. Now, if it persists after a relog, then Marianne' suggestion of unpacking a new body could work. Also, make sure you are "adding" the objects and not "wearing" them. It might be a collision where your viewer sees something attached to a point that others don't see.

Lots of good skins from 2012-ish and up.

This is a gigantic frustration of mine. Sure, men just wear the same things. Because honestly, it's just hard on the group gifts. My gal pals clean up on fabfree, lucky chairs, and group gifts. There just aren't a lot of things for men. So, when I have to pay retail for everything, I am much more selective about my style.

Speaking of graphics. I have a variety of graphics presets in Firestorm depending on where I'm going, and adjust accordingly.

The important question is: can you milk it?

I think SL was a heck of a lot more complicated back in the day for a lot of things. In no particular order: Men needing shirts that were technically jackets so you didn't look like you messed up the laundry. Almost everything needed you to go to a sandbox, drag the thing to the ground, and then copy to inventory. Now I don't need to do that all that much. You didn't have outfits so inventory management was even messier. I am not sure really that dealing with mesh is harder than getting the old layered clothing/prim thing going. When I was learning SL back in 2008, my head exploded trying to sort this out.

Yeah, I think so too. And for females right now there is a Genesis head for $L55, and the Legacy Classic is free (also the male version). The harder part is clothes for them, but that's another discussion. Back to the OP. My limited, non-scientific poll over the last week, is it depends on where you go. Fogbounds seems about 80+% mesh. Muddys, the mesh slightly edges out system. Crossroads was more system. The usual disclaimers about small sample sets applies. It is also very possible to build a decent system body. I have seen some classic bodies I would swear were mesh, and vice versa.

I've been half in, and half out of SL for a long while. With COVID, I needed to "get out" so I came back. I decided to go mesh because, well, what else am I going to fuss about. There are resources, and it involves a bit of figuring. The good news is, on a practical level any of the mesh bodies out there are fine. You can get a desired look with any of them. TBH, I can't tell visually the difference between any of them. On females, Hourglass is more curvy than Maitreya, but I've seen very slim HG shapes and very curvy Lara shapes. As Yogi Berra would say, 50% of your look is 70% your skin. I can tweak my face sliders a but, but the shading and coloring of the skin makes a bigger difference. Thankfully, BOM makes this easier to get into. As long as the body is BOM-compatible (and most are) you don't need to worry about appliers. So, I'd say at the least finding out the skin used, and if there is a BOM skin for it (it will have an icon that looks like a stick figure going, "I dunno." Most of my shape edits are rmore roughing out a look than fine-tuning. Skell's blog has a lot of great how-toos, and was very helpful for me getting going. Also, Urban-Maan has style cards for looks. You're not going to look 100% like the photo, but hopefully at the least the creator can go "here, use this shape." Maybe lean a little on the "I'm new coming back, please please help me."

I am one of those came back due to COVID boredom folks. One of the challenges I have found, and it sounds like you are as well, is finding decent stuff cheap. Women AVs have it easy: the fabfree blog has tons of free stuff posted daily; there are plenty of lucky chairs and groups gifts for women. I haven't found anything similar for men. Also, a lot of the stuff is for the signature bodies, and, as you're finding, not as much for TMP. I ended up shelling out for the Gianni body. Maybe with the old Legacy body being free we will start seeing more stuff for it.