I'm hoping for some feedback from the UX experts, on a new census browser I'm working on.

Pan and zoom around the map at http://203.14.35.213/atlas-2.0/public/nsw/home/map/australia-population.html and let me know what you think. Go to cities, towns and rural areas and see the population distribution. Does it look OK?

(this is a QA service running on a PC so it'll be slow)

Longer version

The problem I'm trying to solve is how to show the most appropriate Census boundary anywhere on the map. This process should be transparent to the (novice) user, who should just see the "best" information wherever they browse.

I can't simply use a scale-dependent renderer since different boundaries are "appropriate" at different scales (the most detailed boundaries should show at around 1 : 2,500 over cities, but 1 : 50,000 over rural areas).

This sample site counts the number of features each time the map redraws, to determine the best layer to show. This can mean that panning the map results in the layer changing (if you open the Legend panel, you can see which of the 5 layers is currently displayed).

Does this "break" the traditional GIS paradigm of scale-dependent rendering? Does anyone have any feedback on whether this approach has merit or is flawed?

Thanks for any advice/feedback!