I guess it really depends on the project. By too many labor do you mean unwrapping for lightmap uvs?
For my projects I tend to just use automatic generated lightmap uvs which work really well about 90% of the time.
After that it’s just a matter of making the materials (of which you could make libraries for future projects), making a light setup and doing some interactivity (which you can both store in a template).
But maybe we should discuss this on another topic, because it’s getting a bit offtopic and we should save this thread for awesome lightmass explanation 