Cheers, and thank you for the kind words
you definitely should, it's more fun than it has any right to be.
Personally, I'd prefer Daz, because of the quality of the images it puts out compared to HS, as well as being much more flexible in your options to customize and kitbash, and having a pretty much endless range of props, models etc. available (at a cost). There's a price to pay though, in both learning curve and time to produce stuff, but it's a trade-off I feel is worth it for giving me complete freedom.
It's true that quite a lot of what daz puts out is geared towards the European and North American market, but because there's so much, there's still a very decent range of assets for other looks and backgrounds available, so you should have no problem gathering the assets you need. Also keep in mind that you're not limited to the daz store, and places like renderocity (and renderotica for the naughty bits) have assets as well.
As for using the daz store, I have one tip: There's Always Another Sale. If you do see an asset you like, wishlist, wait for it to go on sale and then grab it. It takes the edge of initial cost for a starting dev.
As for my method in creating the girls of LomL, I relied heavily on some products that let me endlessly edit and tweak facial and body proportions, specifically the 200 plus head and face morphs and genesis 8 body morphs, as well as a few others. Then it's just a question of iterating on it until you're happy with it.
For skins, that's not something you just whip up from scratch, so I usually go with an existing character from the store and use that skin but not the shape (sometimes with just the slightest tweak to tone and such), but then do the face/body morphs in the way described above.