As far as I know, if you use the Native importer to Carrara you'll get an editable figure with editable bones.  But last time I worked with a boned object in Carrara, I remember having to "de-attach" the skeleton every time I wanted to make a change to the mesh.  That was annoying.

You've got the basic workflow there.  A couple things that can make it easier:

Import the Poser figure, but start a new vertex model for the clothing item.  Open the preview window as large as you can get it; that's where you will check to see how the clothing fits.  This works a little better than having everying in the same model window, as there isn't any way to "freeze" vertices in Carrara.  Very annoying when you keep grabbing the base figure instead of the new mesh you are building.

If you name vertice groups, these will show up as groups within Poser (if you create material zones, these show up as materials within Poser).  In the text of the .obj file the former are "g" lines, the latter "usemtl" lines.  Be careful, though; Carrara has a nasty habit of deleting group names.

You can edit the skeleton in the Setup Room, getting rid of excess bones.  Some people don't even bother -- the extra body parts don't hurt the model any.  Some of us find the "Donor Cr2" method simpler.  For that, you start with the distributable cr2 (usually available for download at DAZ),  then edit it to remove all morphs, materials, and many of the body parts (rarely does any clothing item have eyes, for instance).  Save that somewhere and make copies of it for the clothing items you create.

I have a few additional tricks that so far are serving me well enough.  Must mention I'm still horrid with creasing and fabric-drape type details.  Anyhow!  Nice trick is to work low-poly, fit the low-poly model, then tesselate that.  Even better if you UV map while still low-poly (a lot less work that way).  Another cool trick is outside of Carrara; that is to use Poser's dynamic cloth engine to "shrink fit" clothing items.  Or to drape them.  A poncho for Poser is almost as simple as cutting a hole in a square then running dyamic cloth simulations until you get one that looks nice.