well that code snippet doesn't work apparently. i found the bug by individually selecting objects for baking, and got the exception when i selected the object with no mesh.
Right-click on the viewport name, and select 'configure'. Then, go to Statistics and you can enable and disable polygon / triangle count from there, for the scene or scene and the selected object.
This might help. I started off with a box, illustrated by the selected faces, then I extruded outwards and did a Select and Uniform scale on them to achieve a rounded shape.
NO in modifier stack select your edit poly, select all faces and click hide. Should do the trick. There are other options how to do this for sure as well.
Could be that your scale isn't set to (1,1,1), really common pitfall. Select the cylinders that are unwrapping distorted, press Ctrl-A, select 'Scale'...then try unwrapping again.
Select and delete and so on in edit poly. Or you might try to select all the edges on your model and hitting delete. < wont work, deletes the whole mesh
You can select polygons and use Detach in the Editable Poly rollout of the Modify panel to make the selected polygons into a separate unique object, if that's what you mean.