Oh where did I get the idea that you were creating particles based on bone endpoints? Yes it would be super useful to just arbitrarily place particles and ignore the mesh/vertices.
Re: mixing rigged/weighted deformation with your particle deformation: Since this doesn’t work the way I had thought, that’s still OK, we can separate this sort of piece into two parts. I’ll prepare a scene with a character and some suitable pieces and get back to you, thanks.