I didn't know about this trend, thank you for telling me about it, it's gonna be useful to look at all those levels and figure out how others are working and how they are optimizing everything to work better.

And agreed, normal maps are great, and I wish there would a software that could generate them a lot better than what's already available out there. But, because that's not the case, we just need to learn how to create good normal maps by hand if we want our models to look good.