So, if anyone stumbles on this it might be worth to know the following:
With 110km^2 or essentially very large landscapes made up of 1009px tiles, or 505px tiles, the performance degrades once all the generated LODs are in place.
With a very large tile size (max size being ~8km, and what was used within Kite demo) the performance is very poor when the landscape’s LOD 0 is present.
This can be manually managed on a per tile basis by setting the LOD0 size and screen size options to get it to exclude LOD0.
Given each project is different, the precise settings will probably be different for everyone. But it is possible to maximize the distribution and get 120fps on those large maps which end up working just as well as the smaller ones.
The beautiful thing about the 8km maps is that the generation of the LODs works perfectly in the distance, as opposed to using 64 levels to do the same thing and fighting with the engine to try to pack them together and reduce the draw call count.
Still not really sure on how to handle the billion plants that would be visible in the distance particularly on ridges, but thats probably going to be a manual process of merging billboards and packing them into the LOD level with a unique texture…