Thank you for coming back to this old thread and confirming the issue. I hope you’ll have the time to improve area lighting in general soon, as little seems to have happened in that area in the year since this was posted. I suppose the biggest change was area lighting working in lightmass, but I believe that was a community contribution.
Anyway if you are working on it in your free time I’m sure I don’t have to convince you that it would be nice if it was prioritized a little higher, so thanks again and hopefully we won’t have to wait another year for more progress.