Quote - Seriously, do yourself a favor and get a good CR2 editor.  I very highly recommend Dimension3D's Poser File Editor, but even a free one like John Stallings' will save you so much pain.  I've done a fair bit of scripting and programming over the years, and even though I'm pretty comfortable with editing large oddly-formatted gibberish like Poser's files, trying to do it in Notepad was brutal.

I don't know about the exact process you're using here.  Auto Group Editor is involved?  Maybe it is adding these bones for you.  Poser's built in Group Editor won't do this.

When testing, you really should test every joint, every bend axis.  Thankfully you only have to do it for one side, left or right, and when you're finished you can do Figure menu -> Symmetry -> Left to Right, and when prompted for "Copy joint setup information" select Yes.  Once you get comfortable with this workflow after having done it a few times, it gets a lot easier to tolerate, it really doesn't take too long to check.  That's the point of using the "donor CR2" method, because most joints will already be OK.

When adding posing handles for the skirt, the thing you may think of as a first step - actually adding a ball or cube or whatever to be the handle for the user to grab - is the thing you probably should do last.  Focus on getting bones into the skirt that get the deformations that you want, and save the CR2 incrementally (e.g. "Dress 1", "Dress 2", "Dress 3" etc.) 

Save frequently!  There are some devastating bugs that can pop up unexpectedly, like sometimes you'll add a bone and it will seem to work OK, but when you save and re-load the figure, that bone won't bend anything any more.  Why?  Who knows!  But at least you saved a previous version and can fall back to that.

Wow I'm surprised I understood all of this. lol

I guess I am learning after all. :woot:

Will do!