The panel trick is old school! Thats something from Eric Hansen's playbook! I love it!

I was just partial to Area lights from Maya.....(1 because they were native Mental Ray lights) (2 they were the only lights that actually resembled realworld lights...kinoflows)

I guess its stupid because Im not using Mental Ray......although I havent tried using Vue with Maya MR

My big complaint with any CG lights is they have nothing to do with real world lights......it was always some voodoo science for a lighting artists to match the lights on the DPs set. Then HDRIs were invented and people started paying attention to real world lighting from the set.....a buddy of mine is working on creating a whole catalogue of Mole Richardson into Mental Ray lights.....

www.mole.com/

One question why would you make the light Blue? (I assume its for bounce light in the shadow?) Alot of the bounce light from a forrest canopy would have green in it too....from all the leaves....

Quote - Area lights are great for creating certain types of lighting but you do need to change the settings in Vue to get a good render with them.  They are not a good way of creating a fill light at the moment except in small scale scenes.  For a vast landscape I'd go with Chipp's suggestion of an infinite light with its power controlled by changing its colour. 

If you were working on a close up the old tricks for simulating area lights with arrays of point or spot lights work well and allow you to control the brightness.  The added bonus of that method is the render times are significantly less than an area light.  Personally I'd only ever use them when the light is visible in a render, is very close to an object that is in the render or will be reflected by an object in a render - the rest of the time an array of lights is far more efficient.