With a bit of tweaking, I was able to get the lighting and reflection probe to cast enough light into the scene to make it worthwhile. I just wanted to share my findings to save others some time in case anyone is wondering whether it is worthwhile to switch to LWRP or not.
LWRP has has been deprecated and is no longer maintained. If you hit bugs, you probably don’t come around to switch to URP to get those things fixed. LWRP might also stop working with newer Unity versions.
Yeah it’s the same thing with more features. LWRP is no longer given features. Nobody should be using LWRP, ever unless they have no choice and a game is in long term support or too far along in development.
It would be good to know which version of LWRP > URP you went from. Also yes re-tweaking PPv2 over to PPv3 is not as smooth as it could be, but it is faster and maintained. I would be interested as to why it looks much duller than before, as well as the frame debugger, as even though it is faster, it is odd seeing the increase in both draw calls and set pass calls.
I think that URP looks much more consistent though, and as @hippocoder pointed out, LWRP should be avoided at this point as only URP Is going to be supported in 19LTS.