For basic sculpted detail in your example, a simple rectangle shape is needed. General guides not hard rules. * Only add extra edges / tris when you have form change or want to keep the curvature of surface smooth to match with high poly curvature. As you have noticed too many small tris by pro artists, those usually are…
One thing is that what happens on a flat surface that's separated by a smoothing group or reigned in by a support loop or custom vertex normals basically doesn't matter for the shading. And then, the local detail you added along the longer edges of the indentations seems only partly necessary and the way you terminated it…
Thank you very much for your feedback. It really helped me to see my mistakes and reconsider my approach. I’ll revise the topology of this piece based on your suggestions. As you mentioned, I tested the second example with the long thin triangles to see if they would cause any issues. While they didn’t seem to create…