>>365456376
This post is so retarded, that I'm not even sure where or how to start replying to it. Here goes.
>Use a realtime directional light set to 0.01 intensity with no shadows (so that user shaders can get directional)
This is not only mostly useless, but also somewhat detrimental for performance and is semantically incorrect. Most modern shaders these days can "guess" the light direction from the ambient lighting, and this looks and works really well. If people are still using Cubed's or Standard which can't do this, that's not my problem.
A single directional light like that will technically not add any drawcalls, but it will still uselessly add and use this data.
Also not to mention, the "guessed" ambient light direction used by many shaders will break if you have an actual directional light in the scene, which means that avatars close to a baked light source will now look incorrect.
>if you can get everything into one lightmap texture at 4k, great. if there's like 14 of them... it's actually super bad
that strongly depends on the world, your quality settings and lighting settings (such as the actual lightmap texture's resolution). 14 textures isn't necessarily all that much in a large and well-lightmapped world.
>and using crunch compression
this is useless for anything except download size. textures live in VRAM non-crunched, even if crunched beforehand.

the rest of your suggestions boil down to "basically just make your world have a baked flat ambient color everywhere". I don't know if you realize this, but worlds should actually LOOK good, too. The lighting you described here is extremely basic and will not be attracting any users, and will not be gaining you many performance benefits either. light probes are already absurdly and extremely cheap because of the way they work.
Also, light probe proxy volumes don't work for avatars.