.25 auto exposure settings? Light rendering?

with the new engine version it seems that a slew of lighthing bugs have been re-introduced.

First, the hair shader seems to light up when a directional light is behind them. Like it used to for pointlights without shadow casting.

Second, the brightness of the scene with default settings seems to be about 2 times what it used to be?

This can be fixed by messing with the custom curve on the auto exposure histogram, however no default curve to modify was provided in the engine content.
same with the mask that the docs reference.
What size of a file are we supposed to use for this mask?
Surely a power of 2, but 1k? 4k? 8k? Or is 512 enough?

Third, dynamic shadows are a mess? They just seemed to function better in .24.
maybe this is still due to auto exposure, but even with altered settings dark areas appear way darker then they should be given the intensity of the directional light and the bounce that the new athmosphere model should be providing in terms of diffuse light.
Adding in a skylight obviously changes the darkness of shadows, but because we cannot yet recapture and are thus waiting on .26 for that, i was considering just ditching it altogether. This essentially makes a tree grove into a cavern that you need a lantern for XD
Sure, there are plenty of ways around it - starting with adding a localized post process. But as a solo developer and for other solo/indy developers the workload of having to do this is insane, even with a copy and paste.

I’m sure the epic team is already on this, given it was the latest changes, i just wanted to share feedback.

**It would be particularly helpful if we could once and for all get a fully working hair shading model that interprets correctly with all the different light situations. **