I agree, baking is quite unintuitive with its long waiting times. But I think for some scenes it really pays off at the end, especially more realistic ones. The precomputed realtime GI has to be "baked"/calculated as well, but on lowest settings it took me a few minutes on my machine, so that was fine.
BTW I recently came across this free volumetric lighting solution here: https://github.com/raphael-ernaelsten/Aura
I haven't tried it yet, but it looks promising. :)