Thanks for that breakdown, I learned a lot! Out of curiosity, is there a reason you didn't do the initial hammer and such in Zbrush? And what exactly is "Cleanup"?
To be fair, Autodesk is charging about $600/yr for Subscriptions, so it's just 3G for the initial price. Still, blender's price is certainly attractive.
In general, with Unwrap UVW and with Skin mods it's better to use modpanel.addmodtoselection with ui set to true. Because unwrap/skin doesn't initialize with addModifier.