Thanks for the excellent feedback, especially in the last few posts.
I decided to go with only defuse maps because I am much faster at making geometry than baking normal maps and such. But I guess its not very useful to work on my geometry skills if I don't build my baking and shader skills to go along with them.
I will definitely watch some videos and read some tuts to try and speed up the process for me. It should come in extra useful because the next run of models I'm going to be making will be cartoony character models (animal-people and the like).
