I recall reading that Mirtich paper when I was doing my undergrad project. I still have a paper copy somewhere. You're definitely right in that there's really no excuse for not having proper inertia tensors. Given that paper is from '96, I would think that everybody who needs to know would know by now.
There's at least one contact model I'm fairly sure is unknown in the games industry and another I'm not sure about. A friend of mine (George Baciu) wrote a paper for an IEEE conference (Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, I think) on a method that solves the collisions using graph theory. One of the nice things about it is it handles multiple simultaneous collisions correctly. I'm annoyed because I can't find my copy of the paper or even the paper name at the moment. The other one is a volumetric contact model from Yves Gonthier's PhD thesis, "Contact Dynamics Modelling for Robotic Task Simulation" at the University of Waterloo. There's a thesis that uses it for a wheel-soil contact model and there's another thesis that validates it and presents a volumetric friction model.
There's at least one contact model I'm fairly sure is unknown in the games industry and another I'm not sure about. A friend of mine (George Baciu) wrote a paper for an IEEE conference (Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, I think) on a method that solves the collisions using graph theory. One of the nice things about it is it handles multiple simultaneous collisions correctly. I'm annoyed because I can't find my copy of the paper or even the paper name at the moment. The other one is a volumetric contact model from Yves Gonthier's PhD thesis, "Contact Dynamics Modelling for Robotic Task Simulation" at the University of Waterloo. There's a thesis that uses it for a wheel-soil contact model and there's another thesis that validates it and presents a volumetric friction model.