One area light is usually enough
A note on subtraction: most of my renders got better when I deleted lights instead of adding them.
The instinct with a scene that reads badly is to add a fill. Nine times out of ten what it actually needs is for the key to be moved and everything else switched off.
Dust Chapel — the free desert interior in the store — is one 4m area light, one volumetric cube, and a sun disabled for the final frame. Everything that looks like bounce is geometry doing its job.
comparison — three lights vs one
# quick sanity check in the console
for l in [o for o in bpy.data.objects if o.type=='LIGHT']:
print(l.name, l.data.energy)If a render only works with four lights, the shapes are not carrying it yet. Go back to blocking.