Should Eevee decouple area light soft shadow samples from overall render samples?

In Eevee most shadows from big area lights suitable for lighting cases like overcast won’t clean up at high samples like 1000. Replacing them with multiple smaller lights with lower intensity will. As far as I understand this is due to 1 jittered shadow sample for each light per sample. So having multiple lights covering the same area will give the same effect as having more shadow map samples per render sample. 25 lights instead of one, virtually 25 times more shadow map samples. Increasing the render samples to high values rockets the overall rendering time to unreasonable and will still fail to clean up the banding like artifacts for single big area lights.

Example with 128 samples (1 vs 25 area lights):

I’m not sure if this is feasible in any way or if I have overlooked something, but the current situtation is odd workflow wise as there aren’t easy workarounds like array modifiers for lights and there’s light fall off differences. Having the option to increase jittered shadow map samples per light would fix this.

Thread on BA where the problem was highlighted: https://blenderartists.org/t/eevee-lamp-size-and-diffuse-lighting/1242562.

2 Likes