I have quite a lot of hub activity (primarily lighting as you would guess) at sunset. As my automated lighting grows, at some point should I be concerned about signal traffic congestion (in this case, at sunset)? Would it be prudent, for example, to have 1/3 of devices turn on 1 minute prior to sunset, 1/3 at sunset and the last 1/3 at 1 minute after sunset?
I have an imaginary limit on the number of cause-and-effect cycles per second. Anything near 4 per second and I assume that the hub is at it’s limit. It will queue events at that point.
Your situation sounds like there’s one cause: sunset, and many effects: the lights on if it were ONE rule.
If the next 2-4 seconds had nothing else going on. Then the queued events would finish and the hub would return to normal
In other words, you will spread the load by splitting the rules, but if there’s nothing else going on anyway, you’ve injected a delay for no gain, in my opinion 
For clarification, I have a Simple Lighting Rule for each light (different lights have different levels of dimming). I suppose I could combine into groups to shorten the list by combining lights with the same dimming level into a single group. I imagine I would need a separate rule to handle each dimming level. It sounds like you are stating that it doesn't really matter though. Correct?
It matters. The question is really “how much does it matter?” If you have no other automation running at that time then the answer is it doesn’t matter much at all . If that happens to be the busiest time of the day for closing windows, the garage door, etc then the impact to those others will be large. Matters a lot.
This is the fundamental question I had as well. I decided that the weather driver I was using was consuming resources because everything was in one loop. I decided to break it into three smaller loops and spread them out, time wise. It helped. Mostly because it was running every few minutes. But it wasn't using any devices so it's main benefit was due to the gaps between each loop. Z-Device radios got an increase in their 'slice' to empty out the queue.
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Remember the radios are essentially serial devices with transmission speeds defined by the owner's of the standard (Zigbee or Z-Wave). I like your idea.
I have most of my lighting rules spread out +- 15 mins for sunrise and sunset. Unless something is super important otherwise it doesn't hurt to spread out the load.
Or you get a dozen hubs like some members and say "who cares" and move on. 
