Gaps in HDRP's toolkit

So I'm trying HDRP once again and I have thoughts. I generally have a much more positive opinion than the last time I tried it (which was a while ago), but there are still some gaps in its toolkit (gaps that more or less existed in Unity forever, but I expected HDRP to fill them).

1. Reflections (SSR Bad?)

My problem is that HDRPs SSR looks bad. I mean all SSR looks bad, but HDRP's implementation is filled with artifacts, artifacts that other games these days have overcome just fine. (and I was hoping to use just a bit of SSR to get some sort of blurry short distance reflection to *ground* things, but even that looks pretty bad)

So I can't use SSR. What am I left with? Reflection probes are great and we finally got sphere for projection and influence, but... Why can't I have convex meshes for projection? And why can't I have image proxies to ground things? Having these two would greatly reduce the need for the really subpar SSR.

2. Shadows

Direct shadows look pretty great. At the very least they're much better than all previous Unity attempts at shadows combined. I am having a bit of trouble making the contact shadows not look completely out of place and failing badly, but maybe I'm doing something wrong.

But my main issue is: We still don't have a proper solution for indirect character shadows for characters.

(Like say, Last of Us ambient shadows for characters).

I mean sure, I can use Ambient Occlusion, but to add enough shadowing to my dynamic objects, I have to crank AO so high, that it makes all my static environment corners look moldy - remember, my environments are lightmapped and do not need extra "fake" corner shadows.

So what do I use for this? I think that I will be doing tricks with blobs once again to get something resembling indirect shadows from the characters, and for how "high tech" HDRP's supposed to be, I think there should be something included that deals with this.