I agree with your analysis but I can’t explain the numbers. I’d expect a 4 (face) normals per vertex and possibly a (vertex) normal too.
I’ve just posted in Chapter 6: Textures (without ModelI/O) - #4 by tchelyzt to describe how this “normals” interpretation intended to uniformly colour faces falls down when I want to texture faces (without ModelIO).
As for your comment:
for me, the jury is still out. I kinda can’t believe that Metal cannot handle it, but I certainly don’t know how to as Metal to do it.
Incidentally, how is your poly-sphere produced? In Blender?
My torus is designed to preserve hexagon similarity. It narrows the hexagons as they climb in the northern latitudes from the exquator towards the inquator and then mirrors that in the southern latitudes. Each successive hexagon bears the same proportionate down-scaling to its predecessor. I’m fooling around with the idea of an (impossible) toroidal planet on which a game could be played.