ahh okay, was getting ahead of myself. Would have been really neat if zbrush would be capable of a "double smooth" or smooth by smoothing groups feature.
The way to create UV shells by smoothing groups in Max should be fairly straightforward. Do your selection(s) in edit poly by smoothing group (smoothing groups dropdown), open the UV editor, break the group off and relax. Boom! Instant UV island by smooth group. Rinse and repeat this process.
Not sure if it's mentioned here before but its a good idea to use smooth valley or smooth peak brushes for surfaces with convex or concave irregularities. It allows you to smooth based on convex or concave extrusion/intrusions. Perfect for those hard edges that you want gone.
For those that use 3DCoat instead of ZBrush for this workflow, is the best way to get a high poly model from a voxel just to use the autotopo? Is there a way to control how much the smooth all option smooths the mesh?