The PBR textures are fine for new routes but when dealing with legacy routes which I have, it's way too much work to redo them. A couple of my still working routes are well over 320 km long if not longer and I'm in no mood right now to have to redo the textures yet again.
My current project started out in TRS06, was "upgraded" to TS12 then, temporarily, to T:ANE before being born again in TRS19. 375km of track (not including sidings, etc) and uncounted baseboards. I have converted all the textures (none of which were PBR) to PBR. The
Bulk Asset Update/Replace Tool, using the "Anywhere on the route" option, went into overdrive and it performed a brilliant job. There was some tweaking needed here and there, with some judicious adjustments of the radius and sensitivity tools, but the job was surprisingly quick and nowhere near as difficult as I expected it would be.
The worst part is N3V took perfectly working 2D textures from a dozen years ago and broke them by turning these legacy textures into PBR textures.
I sympathize.
That was the problem I had with my project. Suddenly, overnight it seemed, some of my most used textures went "whacko". As you said they had been converted to PBR textures and I immediately noticed that PBR and non-PBR textures do not play well together. That plus the strange over-painting of road and track splines. So I had no choice, I had to redo all the textures, as described above.
Some experimenting eventually revealed the optimum settings for the texture brush and the Trainz Settings Performance options.
But, in the end, I am more than happy with the result. The move to PBR is now permanent for me. I will not be going back to the 2D textures. It was bit of a brutal way to discover the benefits of PBR and I suspect that if the unannounced and unexpected conversions had not happened then I would still be using 2D textures and leaving PBR in the "manyana" basket for another day.
No wonder I and many others are on the brink of deleting it all. It's not worth it.
No, never. I have been through as many (or almost as many) of these Trainz sanity sapping crises as you have but I always return and always will. There is no other game in town that comes close, in my opinion.