Thank you so much for the detailed answers! It’s super helpful to know where exactly the issue is coming from and that there isn’t much that can be done about it. Not for a small indie dev, anyway.
Static lighting isn’t an option for me, but I’ll try placing shadow-casting point lights more strategically, lower their radii, and replace them with spotlights whenever possible. Maybe I can leverage DFAO to give my scenes more depth and detail even without shadow-casting lights all over the place.
I’m not sure if this is really the same issue. I think the thread you linked to is mainly talking about problems with smooth surfaces, which can be ‘fixed’ by increasing the polycount. In my case, I could increase the polycount of the objects a thousandfold and it wouldn’t make any difference.