You could just paint those values onto a texture channel, much as you would transparency or reflectivity. So you are wanting some sort of vertex map control over the behavior of clothing. Hmmm ... in effect, you kind of, sort of have that right now ... any piece of clothing can have multiple dynamic cloth groups. This is in addition to the soft and rigid decorated groups, and the constrained and choreographed groups. You can select any number of vertices and create separate dynamic groups for them. Then you could assign properties that would make that section of the clothing stiffer than others (for example), by adjusting the dynamic control settings accordingly. That would probably accomplish something similar to what you are describing.