Couldn’t agree more. In my project, I had all the walls as a single object. So, instead of separating each walls, I separated the faces which were directly exposed to lighting. By this way, we can minimize the Lightmap resolution of each objects and also get better results with lower settings.
For example, I have found following values applicable across the projects with very less degree of variance:
Static Lighting level Scale : 0.7 - 0.8
Num Indirect Lighting Bounces : 100
Indirect Lighting Quality : 5
Indirect Lighting Smoothness : 0.6 - 0.65
Most of the times I haven’t even touched BaseLightMass.ini
With regard to Unwrapping, I used steamroller but it has few problem for complex objects(I get some couldn’t access level 3 object error). For Complex objects, I unwrap manually.
With regard to v-ray quality renders, some of the users (Koola, rafareis, rebellogp) have already achieved it. You can check forum posts for some of there works.