Quote - Daz explained that with the texture painting tools available now, that when doing the uv mapping, that to them it made sense to put parts of the figure that would benefit the most from hi resolution maps in thier own UV space.

Thats actually how it is also usually done in the pro 3d world as well, and probably where they got the idea from.

Yeah the seams are a pain for people using traditional legacy texture painting methods, but with all the outstanding tools available now, good texture painters take should be taking advantage of the new tools available.

I personally also preferred fewer seams as well back then.. but then again I was also using old legacy texture painting apps. Now I use zbrush and other things, and I hardly ever even worry about seams anymore.

Yes, exactly. Thank you.
I think the version I did has fewer seams than the original, but even so, was made more with Zbrush and Deep Paint 3D in mind, while I also tried to strike a balance for those who would use Photoshop for applying photo textures, and trying to minimize distortion as well.
As far as I know, SaintFox and BlueEcho are the only ones who have made textures for the latest Antonia versions (118-120?). I haven't actually seen BlueEcho's version aside from a few renders, but I do have SainFox's latest, which is very good. She used Photoshop too, and anyone who really knows what they're doing in Photoshop can deal with seams easily enough.

What dph is doing is cool and is looking good, but it's probably not going to be a freebie (correct me if I'm wrong), and personally I think that mapping a figure to accommodate existing textures is a really backwards way of going about it. Just because the general idea is to UV map a figure and then create textures for it - ideally you create distortion-free UV maps and then you have much better results with textures you create for that mapping. Mapping a figure to accommodate textures, it would seem to me, would almost guarantee lots of distortion all over the figure, making it more difficult to apply new textures to that mapping.

Now, that's just an assumption; I've never actually tried it, so I could be wrong about that, but I'd like to see that V3-Antonia mapping with a UV checker applied instead of a texture, before I'm convinced otherwise.