Hi,
I’ve been trying speedtree for only a few days so i’m absolutely not a expert on it, but I think it’s a very usefull tool.
I don’t even think to make kind of tree by hand, it would take so many time. With speedtree you can have a good tree in few minutes (and you have lightmap UV, LOD, wind automatically).
But they need to improve the UE4 integration (and fix few bugs in the speedtree modeler). I have some weird texture/lod problems (the tree textures change randomly to a very low resolution and I absolutly don’t know why :/), reimport a tree is not really practical (I lose the materials/lightmap res settings all the time) and can cause weird bugs sometime.