I've noticed that most 3d gaming/rendering environments represent solids as a mesh of (usually triangular) 3d polygons. However some examples, such as Second Life, or PovRay use solids built from a set of 3d primitives (cube, sphere, cone, torus etc) on which various operations can be performed to create more complex shapes.

So my question is: why choose one method over the other for representing 3d data?

I can see there might be benefits for complex ray-tracing operations to be able to describe a surface as a single mathematical function (like PovRay does), but SL surely isn't attempting anything so ambitious with their rendering engine.

Equally, I can imagine it might be more bandwidth-efficient to serve descriptions of generalised solids instead of arbitrary meshes, but is it really worth the downside that SL suffers from (ie modelling stuff is really hard, and usually the results are ugly) - was this just a bad decision made early in SL's development that they're now stuck with? Or is it an artefact of what's easiest to implement in OpenGL?