Ambient Light vs Skylight? - Beast Lightmapping and Render Settings

hello, could anyone explain to me the advantage of the fact that ligthmap baking uses the ambient color from the render settings? isn't sky light the better way to go? if i turn down ambient light, my character is too dark. if i turn up ambient light, my lightmaps become too bright. so every time i want to bake my lightmaps, i have to turn down ambient light first, then turn it up again so that my character doesn't have pitch black 'shadows'. am i missing something here? is there a better workflow to this?