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That's the conclusion I was coming to. It's unfortunate as I have already created some interesting effects using the brute force method and representing a mesh as a sphere tree (with each sphere acting as a constrained particle). If you'd like to see what I mean, I'll be releasing a tutorial on our vector calculus scripting language at the end of next month which includes this demo.
Anyway, given the size of our scenes, I guess the main game objects are stuck with central forces and specific, optimized handlers for non-central forces for now. If anyone has any other ideas I'd welcome them.