This work focuses on the design and engineering of metropolitan area optical networks for multicast session provisioning. Specifically, the impact of polarization-dependent gain/loss of optical components in coordination with other physical layer impairments is investigated for the first time for several optical multicast algorithms and switch designs. Performance results indicate that the conventional probabilistic handling of PDG/PDL is not practical in this case, requiring a more refined and computationally efficient interaction between physical and control layers.