Thanks so much for taking the time to provide this thoughtful response; I’m glad to hear at least that this is not an afterthought and that some work is going into bringing lost use-case functionality back to the engine <3
To better support that path we are right now working on some ways to more conveniently and with higher quality pre-tessellate and displace static meshes.
Research is in progress on that now, ie proprietary Nanite tessellation and displacement mapping.
I am particularly excited about both of these, and especially #2, since this would be a huge leap forward for us 3D artists in terms of easing the workflow between external softwares and UE. Have a great afternoon 