Quote - Actually, by breaking the mesh up into separate pieces around the sharp creases pretty much solved my issues.

Just to warn you, this has a couple of major downsides:  Polygon smoothing does not work well with this trick (it can make gaps appear), and displacement mapping can do unexpectedly sharp/bad things at that polygon break also.  As long as you're aware of this that's fine, what you're doing there is a common technique in Poser modeling (e.g. Stonemason does this with most of his models).

Regarding your new problem, that's actually a symptom of what I was just saying about polygon smoothing.  Maybe just turn off polygon smoothing for the entire object (you see the option for that in one of your screenshots there).  What is going on is the edges of the geometry that are loose are getting some micropolygons drawn in around them at render time, and this will make the surface irregular like you're seeing.

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