The TV is a 2012 Panasonic Viera TC-P50U50. It is about a year old now and was broken properly and has seen many many hours. I play for roughly 5ish hours at a time with a 15 min break every hour (I use the tvs built in anti image retention scrolling bar). Pixel orbiter is also enabled so I am taking all precautions for image retention.

The PS3 is open to air flow and on a laptop cooling pad.. It has never done anything goofy and is at max mildly warm to the touch..

Anyhow, if there are no HUD transparency settings I hope they add them. They have a map transparency setting that works great and I don't think it would be that hard to integrate that into the HUD and menu system and simply make it user enabled in the settings.