Some interesting ideas, @FVerbaas, not too unlike some I've toyed with myself. I guess Antonia may have a bit of an unfair advantage with those 6-poses, but I don't think they're strictly necessary in order to get reasonable execution times. I think the code will soon be at a point where it makes sense to throw some of the other figures I own at it and see how the long the computation takes. Then I'll decide if it makes sense to be more fancy about combinations of poles. I think it's quite likely that most figures have some unique constellations, and it would not be too hard to look for them by following edge loops. But I'm still suspecting that's not really necessary.

By the way, Antonia's 6-poles are actually a bit of a pain in my butt, because they're right in the center and break up the nice edge loop that would otherwise split the left from the right side. Blender does not seem to follow edge loops through vertices of degrees other than four, even if the degree is even. I don't know if it's a conscious decision or if they just didn't foresee that someone would be silly enough to make a mesh with 6-poles.

-- I'm not mad at you, just Westphalian.