Yah.  The whole conforming scheme is a bit of a hack.  Never quite worked right.  The reason it was adopted is to allow the face and hands and so forth to be modeled once, and outfits be interchangeable.  But the downsides is that clothing never quite fits right or looks right.

One wonders if there wasn't some way to combine meshes instead, to place the clothing item with the figure mesh into a single mesh to be rigged as a single object (which is basically how they do it for professional animations).

Technically, since you are (presumably) doing this for your own personal work, you could do a hack-and-stitch and put the clothing items and figure mesh together in the modeling application, then go and rig that complete model.  One problem you might have, though, is trying to preserve the UV maps.

Me, I'd learn to rig.  Carrara's rigging is superior, but Poser's rigging is at the moment usable across more platforms (Poser, DAZStudio, Carrara).  Worth giving it a try.  Really, for something like a figure in a relatively skin-tight outfit, you could just borrow the cr2 from the base figure.  Might have to adjust a few zones to make them big enough, but otherwise should work.

Lot of clothing makers use "donor" cr2's anyhow.  I certainly do!  They are the simplest way of arriving at a good skeleton for a conforming clothing item.