I'm using ode in my project. It runs just fine and it's not hard to set up. The only difficoult is to set up the parameters so that the simulation runs as you want. For my car game, that was quite hard
About poligons, 100M poly is a great number Do you really need them all?
100Million polys is in an extreme case, but it im planning on designing worlds with a lot more than that, say like in life you have several cities, towns etc and around them you will have rural areas then go to the the next city/town, etc im building that kinda theme in to a single world, so each world will have several islands with cities, etc. Hope that makes sense.


I looked at a few demos with newton, and a few demos caught my eye, the had an example with bullet decals in an FPS style demo, and a few more advanced ones, looking at the source code looked a bit less scary than ODE i'l admit And the delphi newton headers give you the option of compiling the DLL in to the exe which would be nice.
Is there any demos that show different aspects of ODE or newton, for example a demo that just shows how to to collision detection another for gravity, etc?!