Well, here are my thoughts about the issue of the layout...
1) It would've been better to reveal the layout earlier. But, as racers, shouldn't we be able to adapt to changing conditions? I didn't think it was that big of a change anyway because none of the objects were on the track or right near the edge. They were all well off the track, as far as I can remember.
2) It's totally impractical for the hosts to police each driver and make sure they stay on the track, even after the fact with replays. Also, during the race, their actions affect all of the other drivers who are trying to drive correctly. Using a custom layout like this seems like the best and most practical solution to me to discourage people from driving off the track.
3) You guys are in serious need of some upgrades.
My PC is a 2.8GHz P4, 1GB RAM, 9800 Pro. It's almost 3 years old now and wasn't top of the line when I built it. It's probably going to suffer horribly when Oblivion comes out at the end of this month. But still it's enough to run LFS comfortably at 1600x1200 with 4xAA, 8xAF, even for the Skilldriving Challenge which had hundreds of objects on the track. The number of objects introduced by this layout was relatively small. It seems hard to believe that it would have a significant impact on framerate.
I think what hurt framerate this time around, at least for me, was having a lot of cars near each other all kicking up dust. Dust is a killer. It eats up fillrate like crazy. I think at one point I had 4 or 5 cars right in front of me, lots of dust in the air, and the framerate got down to the 20's maybe, but thankfully it was still plenty drivable. Most of the time it was around 40-60.
If anyone really thinks the layout is what hurt their FPS, I suggest they post FPS numbers when racing alone (single player or empty multi server) with and without the layout loaded.