I've been using Compose with Mason's tutorial, with great success. Whenever he says to work in 3DS MAX, sustitute a process of lining up your .OBJ files in Poser, then combining them in Compose. I've been doing this for months without any problems. Regarding the problems you are citing, though, an image might be useful. Also, I think there is a string in the character creators forum about creating a figure mesh using RDS. Their answer to your invisible vest seems to be that the normals are reversed, but I don't remember the remainder of the string.

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Cage can be an opinionated jerk who posts without thinking.  He apologizes for this.  He's honestly not trying to be a turkeyhead.

Cage had some freebies, compatible with Poser 11 and below.  His Python scripts were saved at archive.org, along with the rest of the Morphography site, where they were hosted.