Also remember that game characters are usually modelled with all their clothes and equipment. To get a real total in SL you would have to take into account the base mesh and all the mesh clothes being worn.
Most of the TPV have been able to make bigger prims for a long time, but only in OpenSim, not on SL. It seems a great many people figured out how to do this in SL as soon as the mesh server code was enabled on some test sims.
Yes Footshadows OFF. That's another major annoyance, in fact, not saving ALL the preferences between sessions is pretty bizzare behavior for any piece of software.