no reason not to use shaders on large levels.

chunked terrain is theoretically a nice automatic optimisation, but i've never used it. commercial is leagues ahead of extra. pro has a few advantages, and i wouldn't sell a game that wasn't made with professional, but when you reach that stage you'll be planning on making up for the cost of pro anyway.

buy comm.

i wouldn't use a beam effect for rotating spotlights. i'd probably program an extremely basic volumetric shader, if it really needed to look great. or an animated model with an alpha channel.

julz