Yes and no. How many sides you use depends on a case by case basis; budgets, scale of the object, how often is it used, how significant is it, if animation hides some roughness, and so on. But one rule of thumb I use is to use about 150% the amount of sides for 200% the size. Here's a mockup based around the base circle…
Project #1: The Soap Dispenser I chose this object for two reasons:- I wanted to start with something simple (in fact, this was my first project ever);- I needed to get used to the Blender / Substance Painter workflow as soon as possible. References Modeling and Retopology I haven't built the dispenser as a single stitched…
'Splitting the vertices for the hard edges' is the same as adding a (single!) bevel though, unless you do it on an UV seam (in which case the vertices are already split). Here you've got a double bevel, which is adding quite a bit of tris that I personally would've used elsewhere. @Eric Chadwick is hosting a nice article…