Thanks very much for the advice and tips, any additional information is always welcome.
For what you were describing with poses, does that mean you export all your poses as full body poses regardless of if that's the intended use in future?
What I had been doing was exporting poses with the root selected, but then [check only modified] + [the transforms for the given part/limb]. This was time consuming because I'd need to manually select/deselect all the 'general' transform trees. I would do this for say a hand pose so it not only did my pose, but reverted any prior transforms to zero, and without this the limb's pose position was a function of its prior state.
Or perhaps in less confusing speak - I found it difficult because the "pose controls" sliders dont neccesarily correspond to actual "transform" value changes, so to be confident in a new pose taking correct shape you need to zero out past tranforms and apply the new pose.....but it sounds like with your way I can just check everything, export whole body, then during pose import choose what I want to apply it to, do I understand you correctly?
Well, first off I didn't realize you were talking about how to SAVE poses, but thought you were trying to just use specific parts of pose-assets, so you can mix them together. When you want to save your poses, you need to just turn off any of the BS (like random translations, or face expressions) that you don't want to save.
Yes, I basically save full-body poses whenever I save poses, because you never know what you need and it's really simple to use what you want. It's a bit involved trying to describing ALL the steps you wanna go through, lucky for you though there are youtube-guides for stuff like that! Pretty sure I've used this one when I was trying to figure out how to save custom poses:
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He makes a couple mistakes as he does it, but he also shows you how to unfuck it so you get a saved pose that works without weird translational and/or rotational movement that you didn't want!
Here's also a guide basically showing how you can mix different poses together easily:
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