Yea, I'll probably be looking into MD since dForce never really seem to work for me in any kind of short time. I spent WAY to long on just that tiny little adjustment for the cloak, at some point I just gotta ask myself wtf is the point?Last ditch things you could try is to move the character/item slightly away from origin. Dforce (and daz positioning) uses floating points. this results in weird behaviors in a few ways (such as the infamous black eye surface when characters are a long way from origin), and a tiny change of coordinate position could make the calcs land differently.
For the record, I also hate dforce.
Another route that many devs take is to use marvelous designer for the cloth sim. it's a bit of a rigamarole with importing/exporting characters and stuff but you get far better cloth results.
The cloak is supposed to be dForce ready, it should've worked fine from the get go, but it wouldn't even work from the vendors initial position:
https://f95zone.to/threads/dforce-desert-heart-clothing-for-g8f.105236/
Not a single dForce object worked in that original scene, I have no idea why. Tried a couple other pieces in their base positions (no clipping) on a base G8F, and every single simulation crashed the application by exploding the dForce object. I still have no fucking clue what was wrong. Same simulation-settings, same cloak positions, same poses etc. even the EXACT same character-coordinates in the scene. Yet one works, and the other doesn't.
I did manage to get it to work eventually, by "just" rebuilding the entire scene. It turned out fine, but it REALLY should not have taken that much effort.
Before:


Like, don't get me wrong I think it looks better, but bruh that was NOT worth HOURS.