I'm just passing through at the moment and you've covered a lot of ground, so I won't reply to all of it until I've had a chance to think about it and / or look into it...

With that said...

re: Lumpiness

Aha - that makes sense... so most of that goes away if you don't include the brows in that pass?

re: Best we can do

That would imply that we're out of ideas... are you? :)   I'm not, so no.

re: dot-checking Normals

No - I assumed that the script was (of course it's an 'option' on the script, but I always enable that).

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