Improving lighting in Unity 5.5

In previous versions of Unity, you could open up a brand new project and the basics of the lighting would be taken care of. As someone who never really got anywhere with the engine but wanted to come back and try it again, I find it very annoying that, in the latest version of 5.5, lighting has to all be set up manually. Not only that, but when you do add a directional light, it looks quite bad, at least in comparison to what 5.0 looked like.

Unity 5.5 (with soft, realtime shadows, without it's even worse):


Older Version of Unity:


Am I going nuts, or did the lighting quality go down? 5.5 is way more stark, dark and rigid. Those two spheres are identical, and yet one shows up bright and fully illuminated, while the other is grey with a great deal of complete blackness on it. Turning up the directional light's intensity only makes it worse
Now, I'm imagining there's some way to improve this, since 5.5 is a more advanced version, but for the life of me I don't know how. I've fiddled around with all the sliders in the directional light, but I've had no luck.

Anyone know how to improve this?

 

Couple of questions:

1. Are the spheres really identical? The default material in recent versions of Unity is grey, not white.
2. Are you running the same color mode (linear or gamma) and rendering path (forward or deferred) in both scenes?
3. Are the spheres marked lightmap static in either scene? Is your directional light realtime, baked, or mixed?
4. I can't see the camera background in the roll-a-ball screen shot. Is there a skybox? What is the setting for your ambient lighting?

(Correction to #1, the default material is now white in 5.5. I just started using it a few days ago and hadn't noticed that yet.)

 

I don't think anything changed on that front, but allow me to offer a counterpoint

I personally, find it very annoying that I have to unset all the lighting, because no one in their right mind would use the default settings...

Try switching to deferred.

 

Here is what I get in Unity 5.5.0f3, Mac OSX platform, all realtime lighting, default shadow settings. The sphere is default material, and the plane is a fully-saturated blue at about 75% luminance. Linear color space, forward rendering. The directional light is at default parameters except that I rotated it about the global Y axis.