AO, Metal, Roughness, Displacement etc are using RGB when instead they should be using Grayscale mode.

The material slots designated for non color maps could be made to auto convert to grayscale to reduce file size, vram and performance overall. This would include making sure the physics textures are converted to Grayscale as well as exporting to Unity/Unreal

Import/Export pipeline should also have it built in.

You could make it optional to allow color images to be used in the other slots so texture linking will continue to keep the project low memory.

This not a software bug unless we look at skingen or baking textures, it is an overlooked technical management bug that has plagued your content for years. SkinGen could benefit from the performance increase if using Grayscale and it should only create-also other programs could benefit from your characters if all the maps were properly exported as grayscale.

Consider the value that I share with you, changing this would create more than 2/3s more free hard drive space for customers, your servers, a major realtime & rendering speed improvement etc This is efficient and responsible.

I've also shared a method of increasing CPU processes for physics baking, Iray Rendering and Iray export by up to 3x disabling the viewport and it can be sped up even more.

These concerns are global effecting all your software that can benefit all your software and customers.
Please consider the value of these changes that benefit everyone, they speed up workflows and save everyone time/money,
Please consider offering rewards to those that present/offer great breakthroughs such as beta access and free upgrade so we can continue to make improvements. You may not be able to hire out, but you can spare content or software rewards.

I often lose time/money testing and reporting issues and without reward, I find no value in reporting things that would be extremely valuable to Reallusion -if I can't afford to upgrade just to have these enhancements/fixes.

There needs to be a check script integrated "if grayscale don't convert to RGB". As I've noted below the maps are being converted to RGB. If iClone8 or CC4 included channel packing as game engines do, I imagine this would all be automatic and efficient but as it stands right now, all your conversions, generators etc make non color maps RGB and all your non color content is also RGB.