Guys I fully understand the concern about setting on tick, nobody should be doing that, but on live 6.2, it can handle 500 SetTexture() without drops, and, 7.0.3 10 textures already are dropping fps from 90 to 7.
A real world application example issue (which I'm facing now) is this:
http://cdn-wow.mmoui.com/preview/pvw66831.png
There is a large amount of textures to set in one tick and it's causing a small freeze when I open the world map.