On this kind of material, the blend mode only needs to be translucent or additive, and you can then render it unlit. Put your colour into the emissive instead of the diffuse slot when you do this. The vertex shader shouldn't really be affected after you do this. I'd check your main node settings if something changes once…
Essentially yes. You can't control the vertex shader creation much in udk's node based editor. Your blend mode and material type affect it, as does anything going into worldPositionOffset. Just set up your material how you need it and let UDk optimize it under the hood as best it can. There are always going to be more…