Lessons I learned:
1) Searching every container is not worthwhile. All the actual items are in scripted locations and it's EXTREMELY rare for the randomly generated items to ever be noteworthy. (The upside to looting everything is you find out where all the scripted locations are so know in the future which ones to actually bother checking. Especially notable are things like the Smuggler's Ring which is found on a non-descript skeleton)
2) Collecting food items is a waste of time. There's plenty of Supply Packs to be found and easily purchased if necessary. The chance of running out of supplies for resting is basically nil with just packs alone (I suppose if you were cheesing and long resting after each and every encounter for full resources *maybe* you might get low)
3) Gold is easly obtained. Looting absolutely every item to sell and trying to bother with stealing stuff from stores is completely unnecessary as gold is so easily obtained that the actual problem with it, is it eventually weighing your characters down because you can't spend it because you have 10k+ after buying literally every item from every vendor in the game...
4) Most skills are useless. Outside the commonly used skills (Sleight of Hand, Perception, Persuasion and Deception) other skills rarely have any checks at all. Even fewer of those checks actually do anything anyway. So there's not much need to try and maximize skill proficiencies within a party.
5) The "Small openings" that can be found all over the place, do not take you anywhere that cannot be easily accessed by other means. So trying to play especially for them is not necessary. On a side note, if you DO wish to utilize these, Druid's Cat Form can enter them, which is one of the few actual uses of the form (This would be most beneficial to say a Circle of the Land Druid that is primarily using spells rather than Moon/Spore Druid that will be using their Shifting uses for combat)
