I "discovered" I can "hide" vertexes (by element specifically, like picking certain submeshes) by scaling them very, very small and then editing the texture appropriately - but similar experiments to say, steal a female draenei hair style and replace one on the succubus model with it (pigtails <.<) is still met with the vertex count limitation - I've attempted to "work around" the limitation with various silly tricks like editing the obj file directly so the counts match to no success, and hexing the m2 directly.
Has anyone had in luck in anything similar?