Thanks for the reply and I don’t mean for this to sound rude, but there’s a lot there that is really unclear. (In your first paragraph alone there are 5 places where you refer to a thing that you haven’t actually written or named.)
Rather than try to understand it, for now I’ll stick with the approach described at the end of my post and see if a more Unreal-esque suggestion pops up. I added that in an edit so no worries that you hadn’t seen it; it appears I must have missed your reply when I did so. But since your suggestion appears to be about number & vertex crunching just as much as mine is, I don’t think it’s going to be much of an improvement for me to switch from blueprinting in Unreal to coding in Blender plus blueprinting in Unreal.
Again thanks for the thoughts however, just looks a bit rushed there.