reberhart

With regards to visibility of the retopo mesh, Silo has a display mode called "ghosted shade" mode. It basically makes your background high-poly mesh display as an overlay over your new low poly mesh. This would work great regardless of your z-bias setting. You can see what it looks like here: http://www.silo3d.com/forum/showthread.php?t=6917&highlight=retopology I think this would be excellent for 3D Coat.

ZBrush has an option called "cage" in the geometry palette. It approximates the pre-divided mesh. I have no idea what algorithm they use to do this.

I noticed this as well. I'm using the latest demo version for the Mac. The smooth seems very weak compared to every other sculpting program I've used. I haven't used 3D Coat previously, so I don't know how it compares to previous versions. I've tried setting the smooth value as high as 50 and it still effects the mesh very little.