I’m encountering this sort of dilemma in some of my ‘generic’ scenes in my game.
Pretty much, there’s two scenes that are reused across most of the game - the Church of the Goddess, which is in every city, and serves as a place to revive dead party members, or change out party members, and the Shops, because I don’t feel like creating a whole bunch of duplicate shop scenes. What’s more, these two maps are always ‘leaves’ on my tree of scenes - the Church and Shop scenes always lead back to the scene that you entered them from.
The Church scene is interesting, because in addition to loading a specific church’s doodads, I also have to check certain sequence trigger states to see if a given party member is even available (alternatively, I could just ask my Party Manager, which seems like a better idea) - some characters, like Veronica, have certain other game objects tied to them as part of their schtick.
For instance, Veronica is a mage, but mechanically is a wildcard character (and, she’s wild to boot. So, unintentional pun is unintentional, but still a pun.) By having her study her grimoires, you can load her with spells to customize her to a given situation. She’ll easily be the most broken character in my game.
Shops are simpler; based on the scene that the player is coming from, set up all the props, including NPCs like the shopkeeper, and let the camera fade in and control be given to the player.