Things are moving so fast it's hard to keep track. Is nerf still a worthy avenue or is GS + meshing the way to go.

it's difficult to get a triangle mesh from a NeRF if that's what you're asking. I believe the current technique is just ray marching the NeRF at various points which will cause some loss. NVIDIA published a paper doing that last year. There isn't an elegant way to convert it yet AFAIK. Then again my information is about 4 months out of date.

Personally I don't think NeRFs are an elegant way of representing scenes, I'd prefer something more structured than a blob of weights. But maybe it's still a good intermediary to go from images to the final form, I'm far from an expert.

Weights are just numbers, essentially by using a neural network you are telling the system to "find the best way to represent the scene with a budget of X numbers/parameters". Modern NeRFs like instant-ngp also use some grid representations. I guess Gaussian Splatting is slightly more geometrically appealing because you get points around the surfaces that you are trying to model. These points are however not guaranteed to be exactly on the surface, which additional surface losses try to solve (e.g. NeuSG).

Interesting! Thank you!