Oh hell yeah, I love smartypants solutions like this. 2048² in 2012 really isn't bad at all, and makes total sense if you think about it a little. They achieve loads of variation without extra vram usage, and the shader is probably as simple as yours, with not much overhead. While 'hero prop' probably is a bad term, it…
The uv squishing will just be a way to have an atlas and still pack the textures with something that uses the uv0 channel layout - ambient occlusion or something I expect Size wise, there are a few scenarios where 2 channels make sense but iirc it's usually more about quality then memory footprint (3channel bc1 is highly…