While many things you mentioned are absolutely reasonable it's not canceling the fact that smaller or otherwise bigger texel size has been used in games for years as a mean to save texture space for key areas. Characters faces and hands. Bottom sides of certain objects, cars for example. Backsides of static objects or any…
I hope so. As someone who's been responsible for the quality of hundreds of sets of modular assets I put consistent and correct texel density pretty high on my list of priorities. The "it's just a guideline" argument is valid if you're talking about a <5% variation but beyond that you're not only risking a mismatch in…