Hey @Chatouille! I figured you were busy and can’t believe tbh you can take the time at all to message me back! 
LOL. “Fixme: this should be a setting” ■■■■ right that should be a setting ffs! Seems like who ever did the original comments sees the issue and lack of feature I’m after.
Thanks to you and the last code you shared - I’ve had a thought that will solve-maybe-probably-not my problem (I’ve yet to attempt this)
Forcing bNetStartup in the actor to be true (Imitating a map actor) although I don’t know what the full address will mean in the context of being spawned over existing in the world:
/** If true, this actor was loaded directly from the map, and for networking purposes can be addressed by its full path name */
UPROPERTY()
uint8 bNetStartup:1
If I can learn what the full path name represent (I’m assuming maybe a reference to where it is on disk?)… Might be worth a shot. It is public so should definitely be able to be set true. I feel this route is more what I’m after in terms of design - net cull distance and relevance. I can definitely look into making a subclass of NetDriver but would love to check a boolean to make this all work xD
Also I am still open to suggestion 1 its just I’m thinking if there is any possible way to avoid big for loops every server tick that is just for this. I’m going to look at every use of bNetStartup and try to see if it will be possible to not make the thing blow up if I am able to set it true! Then when that doesn’t work i’ll likely attempt a custom NetDriver or change the default NetDriver. Thanks again for your help you have 100% helped me on think about this from both sides and given me the exact line I feel I am after: the “Fixme” part.
Last edit of this post!
I think I might modify default Actor and NetDriver to include a boolean like “bDoNotCloseNetChannel” and in the fix me add that to the if !Actor->bDoNotCloseNetChannel
Busy over the next couple of days myself with work so will update my progress when I make some!