Thanks! I am pretty sure nobody does direct optimization on the mesh quality because it is hefty. I did come across a PhD thesis which was doing it for fluid

Thanks! I am pretty sure nobody does direct optimization on the mesh quality because it is hefty. I did come across a PhD thesis which was doing it for fluid structures interactions and his conclusion was it was inferior to other techniques. I have a few tricks which will hopefully make the problem more tractable. I use FEMAP at my day job have found Laplacian smoothing and FEMAPs other built in tools have been wanting. I am currently thinking that my goal is to try and use reinforcement learning to build high quality meshes. In order to do that you need a loss function and if you are building a loss function you might as well wrap an optimizer around it.