looks good and you have no issue. Go ahead and do it that way, it's good exercise. In the future, however, looking into floaters, could save you time if you want to for example put more time on learning to have a clean bake or push your texturing skills. But good work on it.
@Noors I see. I always thought it should be used only for refinement. I remember seeing someone's work that looked good subD'd but looked a bit messed up at the lowest level. Won't that end up with a lot of texture stretching if you do the cage too different from the subd? Or is texturing/texture behavior upon subd already…
Some things work out awesomely without baked normal maps, and they shade way better than they would with low-resolution/mipped normal textures. I use a similar technique to make environments/props, especially helps with tiling textures since its one less texture/UV channel. You could probably even lower the poly count if…