Thank you very much dude ! that's a great shout, I'll scour the net to see if I find anything similar. If not, Blender will probably have a plugin like this, just need to bite the bullet and finally learn the key bindings for it haha I tried something similar with Maya's Duplicate Special which instances your meshes, but…
For next time since you already made the piles, looks like maya? Is there a similar copy option in maya as in 3dsmax where you can clone an object and instance it so that you can then "edit", the "original" mesh and also be editing the entire pile so that, this situation you speak of with the "ugly-unoptimized meshes", are…