Proper way to maximize reuse of assets within scenes I am trying to use Blender to create game content like models and environments(levels). Whether creating a mesh/model or a level there's usually multiple assets involved that are getting shared by many other assets like textures, other meshes, rigs and materials. The blender flow seems to involve recreating assets every time they're used.

What is the best way to reuse shared assets between .blends and to make it easy to find these assets? I'm aware of the linking functionality but it does seem a lot of work (finding the host .blend and navigating its structure) when there's lots of links to be made for each .blend. I'm also looking for the ability to change the shared asset in any .blend referencing it and have the change propagated through every other .blend that references it (Example: altering a Material or a Mesh that's being referenced by a level). I don't think this is supported by Linked proxies.

If linking with proxies is my only option I was thinking of having every instance of certain types of assets in one .blend file (Like Materials and Textures or sounds but absolutely not models) to make them easier to find when linking. Is this a terrible idea?
It looks linking is what you want, you will have to use the link option. You can find this under File→Link. Although it sounds as though you already pondered this method. After some quick testing it does seem that all the mesh and material data is transferred.
For advise on keeping all the objects organized, keep all the objects you want referenced in a library file and just link from that to keep from going through all the objects you don't need to reference. Also, name your objects properly. Navigating through the .blend structure is easy when you know which folder you need to go to. For whole objects, after you select File→Link, go to your library blend file and select Object→'Objectname'.
Use Alt+D to duplicate the linked object in your level files if you don't want to get another linked object. If you use Shift+D, only the material will update in my experience.