The clearcoat normal shading model was always a headache for me, and I truthfully don’t understand how it works. I think Strata has the potential to be a very powerful thing, and it brings the kind of robustness that next-gen games will need ( the nightmarish shader graphs needed to hack in certain features give me nightmares to this day).
The upper limit is a good question, as is scalability. If we’re given a straightforward way to reduce memory costs for different platforms, it would make development much more straightforward. Personally, I think we’ll be moving more in the direction of procedural textures in the long run, as compute is growing much faster than storage.
Also, when you say ‘encode the normals into an octahedral’ ,how do you mean exactly? They packed the normal map into some sort of cubemap-like atlas? I’m not very familiar with clearcoat, sorry.