Alright finally, after a year and a half of trolling the forums and fiddling with export/import settings, I've solved this issue of how to get Poser animated scenes into Unity (single characters only).

Assuming we're talking about a single Victoria 4 character and conforming clothing:

1. Animate the Victoria 4 model with whatever motion you need in Poser

2. Save the pose as an Animated Pose back to the Poser Library; sometimes the pose will not save hand and foot parts properly and cause the clothing mesh to deform weirdly, you have to open up the pz2 file and find the section for lHand or rFoot or whatever part is deforming weirdly and reset all its translation values to 0 (zero)

3. Pick the clothing you want for the V4 model and add to the scene but DO NOT conform or parent to V4 (just add it stand alone); it is important that all objects are direct descendants of the UNIVERSE scene object

4. Apply the pose you just saved to the conforming clothing; this will animate the clothing as if it is attached to V4 even though it is not

5. Export the scene as COLLADA (dae) 

6. Import into 3DS Max; if you've been running Max for a while I find sometimes 3DS Max will warp the clothing mesh, in this case I just restart Max and re-import the DAE file and it shows up fine

7. When adding optimizers like MultiRes and ProOptimizer make sure they appear underneath the Skin modifier or else they wont take effect when you export to FBX

8. Export from 3DS Max to FBX

9. Import into Unity 3D and generate a Prefab from the FBX reference

Hopefully this gives someone else a head start if their character modeler of preference is Poser, this was a particularly painful road for me to travel.