Great, glad all that text is helping lol
I would say, using auto unwrapping in UE4 is a bad idea. A lot of people (even within the games industry) get lazy and use auto mapping in programs like Maya, UE4, etc. This is bad practice and should be avoided, else you will get really bad lightmapping in your game. The best approach is to unwrap meshes by hand (in Maya, etc.) by laying out UVs that are as continuous as possible, keeping shells to a minimum, and hiding seams in areas of a mesh that players are unlikely to see (i.e. underneath or behind the mesh or in areas where materials change, etc.) It really is an art to layout good lightmap UVs, so far artists layout the best lightmap UVs, procedural tools like Maya’s auto unwrap can’t beat a veteran game artist. Now that said, laying out lightmap UVs is seen as a tedious and annoying task, no one in the studio looks forward to it. So thankfully there are some tools that make the job easier and faster, in some cases you can get lucky and it’s effortless. Tools that can make it easier are ones like Headus UV Layout and ZBrush’s UV Master tool. I also recommend (one of my personal favorites), Ninja Dojo- it’s a plugin for Maya that adds a ton of useful features that should have been included in Maya to begin with.