I will add up about production.
In Crafterria, we started with polyvox 0.2.1 stable. While working on the project, however, Polyvox got so much refactors.... so I don't thing the code left from Polyvox can still be named "PolyVox"
Basically, I am now using raw c char* array class, derived from the current Polyvox trunk's 3D array that David is talking about. No Volumes. The Marching Cubes Surface Extractor got broken into parts that I use directly to extract geometry from own Voxel Type. Basically, the only thing that remained unchanged from me was the PolyVox::SurfaceMesh class.
Also, I changed the algorithm for Marching cubes extraction, instead of iterating over ALL voxels in the 3D array, it casts a ray from camera straight bottom and straight up and then with Dijkstra Spreading "marches" the volume and extracts only the boundary geometry (Huge, huge extraction speed up, because we only iterate where isovalue threshold changes, not the entire region, and you have to learn how Marching Cubes actually work - what is an isovalue, the 8 neighbouring voxels, lerping over the threshold and so on). And, this algorithm skips floating islands!! (unless its "branching" "discovers" one of them), but this is a feature, because all of these islands have a "genesis" point and are extracted to different PolyVox::SurfaceMesh. And the Volumes are completely bypassed.
Still, working like this requires so much modifications of PolyVox that converts the library from general purpose library to something specific for my game - and added as part of my project.
If you don't have the time for such a research, however, things will not be so easy. If you want Minecraft clone with so much realtime editing, these optimizations are very worth.
If you need a tool for meshing, Stick to 0.2.1 and use RawVolume as it is way, way faster then the SimpleVolume, and just works for you more than the latest version.