Quote - But many poses are not properly made, and for poses made for 2 or more characters you can't do that.

Well I apologise for what I said, as it's not strictly true. I was too lazy to explain my point properly. With a static pose fore a single figure it is usually bad practice to include transforms for the BODY actor. The statement I made:

"A properly made pose will not rotate or translate the Body actor."

Is is too blunt, and does tell the whole story. With poses made for two or more characters where their relative positions need to be set in the pose, including BODY translation in such a case is not a such a big sin.  Same with animations, often the BODY translations must be included to get the desired results. Never the less, with the benefit of hindsight, it looks like it would have been better if the relative positions in the couples or group poses had been achieved via hip transforms, rather than BODY transforms.

The real point was that, if a pose does not contain BODY transforms, and any x or z hip translations are not to large, you can use the BODY transforms to position the figure anywhere in the scene, in any orientation, at any altitude, and applying the pose will not significantly change the location of the figure within the scene.

Hindsight is a great thing. I wish I could suggest another solution for you, but all the things I can think of have already been mentioned.