Great idea! There are a decent amount of Vigil Nights ones for the past that you can still watch. Worth posting up there. http://www.livestream.com/vigilnights
That is a nice sculpt. You've got a nice amount of detail without it being overbearing for the art style. Looking forward to seeing how this turns out.
In general it takes 100% of the time to do the high poly as it does to create the low/uvs/bake/textures. It doubles the amount of time, for me at least.
If you want to reduce the amount of indirect lighting try turning down the indirect lighting scale on the lights. Look under "lightmass" in the light's properties.
Awesome, thanks for the link! 360 reference of actual models and not strange people from the streets of eastern Europe. :) The amount of galleries for each model is crazy.