Yea it’s not too bad. Bake times can be long for high quality interiors but when you do exteriors you don’t need the quality to be as high because there is plenty of light hitting your scene. I usually can bake my exterior in 1-2 hours on max quality (10) without having to reduce the lightmass scale to ridiculous numbers (like .2) or tweak the ini files. For exteriors you don’t even need lightmass portals too, saving precious render time again.
I use a single i7 4790k (stock clock) and 16gb of ram.
It’s obviously much more fun to work like that than wait forever for vray/corona to render everything but of course it’s impossible to match the quality of offline renderers.