^Probably why
I think Epic would want a solution that can work with more cases–a lot of the GI solutions out there are only a solution for large open world games that need a TOD and don’t want to waste storage on huge amounts of lightmaps. In other cases, those solutions suffer.
Like for instance in Assassin’s Creed Unity, there’s issues with bleeding and indoor lighting.
I don’t think distance fields are the dynamic GI solution that they ultimately want, unless they can figure out how to expand it for that, it’s just that they were doing some stuff with it and it happens to actually work with doing a bit of GI and ends up as a better solution than things like LPV.