Lightmapping Darkness & Lightmapped Hard/Soft Shadows

Hello everyone, I've been trying out lightmapping recently, and I would like to check my understanding of two elements of this process:

1) Shadow Darkness

-The 'darkness' of the shadows made when lightmapping is more a result of factors such as ambient light, global illumination, sky light, etc more so than any settings directly coming from the light.

-It also seems like the "shadow strength" only seems to matter for real time lighting.

2) Hard vs Soft Shadows

-So far, I can't tell any difference between Hard and Soft shadows when baking a lightmap. I've got 2 pictures attached, one with 'default' hard shadows and the other with maxed out soft shadows and I can't tell any difference. Perhaps hard/soft has no meaning for directional lights or is it a matter of my settings?

Any feedback is appreciated, thank you for reading.