Bad Houdini hack to weight paint clothing spanning both the metahuman body and face skeleton

I had issues with a cloth asset that covered both the body and the neck of a metahuman. Here is a very hacky setup to join the metahuman body and face in Houdini so that it can be driven by an animation. This allowed me to fix the weight painting on one of the cloth assets. It’s for a 5.2 project. Maybe this is all much easier in 5.3 now.

I am curious if anyone knows an easier way of doing this - that does not require Maya.