What is the best way to handle the mass replacemnt or placement of objects?

Development Asset Creation
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Ok so I have a facility that I am building and I have a thousands of objects that will need to be placed instances. Things like lights and or switches. Things that I would prefer to build one prefab or blueprinted version of. It is impractical to then take and place all of these by hand in the Unreal editor. So What is the best way of handeling this in unreal? Surely someone has run up against this? I know that pivots of objects have issues with the fbx importer and all come in at world center. But what about say a single quad. it there a way to determine it’s normal and then say find bottom right corner to determine position and orientation and then place an instance of an object using that?

another approach that my programmer cam up was to have Maya export the positions and orientation of the objects in world space to a text file. could it be possible then to have Unreal editor read that file and place all of them using that information? Is this something that could be done in a blueprint? Run it once to place the objects then remove it?

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If you know how to do some scripting you can do something similar to what I did for 3ds Max: 3ds Max Object Placement Scripts - Community Content, Tools and Tutorials - Unreal Engine Forums

In the UE4 map when you copy an object it copies to a text format that stores the properties of that object and references it from the content browser, so you can make a tool that will take the transforms of an object in your Maya file and then formats it so you can paste to UE4.