Odd that they would retitle something merely used for debugging as a "special feature" (suppose that since it was already in there anyway, they just left it as a freebie). Though, wireframe is far more useful for finding hidden sections on the map than actually constructing the map.
Model data is, of course, optimal, but so specific to each game. If I only knew more about the rendering hardware for anything N64 and later - maybe write to specific registers to set identity+translation and eliminate that irritating projection matrix...