I was literally benching between a custom actor with the component and the same meshes @ same locations VS the foliage tool with the painted instance (where the mesh and locations were extracted from).
The real difference was how foliage subdivided/partitioned the internal instances into different groups for drawcall culling.
(Think of it as HLOD since it’s essentially the same idea).
The custom hism wasn’t doing this.
PS: the plugin looks great, but are the draw calls being reduced by some sort of grouping system?
If they aren’t, then that’s one possible avenue of optimization…