sometimes to fix small issues with dilation, editing the image in photoshop or similar can be easy way to go. You can just duplicate the base layer and add a blur to the lower layer or use a brush to manually paint in color to the problem spots. have not watched this tutorial but looks like it covers what i am talking…
It looks like padding just doesn't get displayed in Painters 2d/UV view. The actual baked map should have padding based on the dilation value set, so ideally no tweaks outside of painter should be necessary (which would have to be repeated on each subsequent bake when UVs changed). What does the baked AO map look like? I…