Yeah they should be the same. I would need to check at the source how the placement is done when driven from the landscape material, but even that one should behave the same generating the HISMC.
Last year, I was hiring, and saw some people not having a clue about the spawner functionality and saw few ppl that was placing one SM at a time and also not familiar even with Merge Actors functionality. This makes my job a bit harder, but luckily we will stay some time without hiring for a year or more, unless some big project appears.