The balcony of what was once a copy of Linda Kellie's Grand Hotel used a "cheat"for the balusters (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baluster) by having a texture on a a thin prim - thus avoiding mesh and multiple copies them or prims. I'd been trying to do the same thing on the Buggle-Praxis base with a tapered box.
The trouble with that is that adjusting the tapering at each end is a bit hit and miss and too often the prim would under and over reach. Working on the pub, I realised that it'd be better to have a couple of prisms on each end. You can then extend the main balustrade as long as you want, and (using LOCAL, not WORLD) move the prisms to the end of that, and extend them out so that it aligns just right. The only catch is that you need to make the adjoining faces on the inside transparent, otherwise you see something that shouldn't be there. On the wooden stairs you a need a prim above and below the insert, so that the balusters don't appear to end in thin air, but a solid balustrade doesn't need either. On a 21 step set of stairs, I eliminated 36 prims!
Like I said, reinvented the wheel again, and maybe some mesh stairs could be used instead, but the prim sets are easy to edit (especially the stone set) and adjust. I'm happy with this because it was a niggling problem I hadn't figured out until now.
