Alright - Call me crazy, but after about 15-20 minutes of tooling around the Wasteland on foot and in my buggy I can confirm that Cvnticvs is right; this does seem to alleviate the problem. Please note - like he said before me; *alleviates* the problem, it doesn't FIX it.
Cvnticvs, if you can confirm my description - the texture pop-in seems to be more graduated when signed out of PSN. Before it just seemed like it was POP, POP, POP in big chunks and was very obvious and at times distracting. For whatever reason, signing out of PSN seems to make it occur more "naturally" if you will. It's definitely still there, but it seems to occur smoother and isn't as jarring to the eye as before. Does that sound accurate to you?
Like I said, the issue is still there... but it doesn't seem as rough as before. I'm no coder/programmer by any means, but it sounds like this could be fixed with a patch. Hopefully they're well aware of it and have their guys/girls working on it as we speak.
I confirm this. It still happens, but the transition is in smaller chunks spread over a wider screen area step by step so your eye only notices one or two little ones in any given area of the screen, instead of a load all in your face. It's sort of an optical illusion really. Your eye just can't see all of them at once as they're more widely dispersed. Also, I've noticed that disabling 1080i and 1080p seems to help. I imagine the game is rendered in 720p anyway. It doesn't sacrifice detail when you do this in my experience.
Oh, also, for anyone who does find this helpful. Don't forget to thank the kind sage who brought this to our attention in the post I linked to. Their name is METALPUNKS. I only brought the news to this subforum, as it was in general discussion.