I'm not up for a brain transplant quite yet, although there are days when a change to something random might have a good chance of being an improvement. I was thinking more of a .mc6 file brain transplant-- or at least a file hack. Would it be possible to do something like finding all of the lines in the .mc6 file that start with "transparencyMAP," and just simply deleting those lines?

(If so, it might be a fun project to create a couple of Python scripts that would save the current material to the current library as either a texture-only file or a transparency-only file.)