I tried turning on my diffuse light which had AO turned on, and that helped a little, but it was far from perfect.  So short of yelling at the vendor or manually fixing every node on every save (and there are a ton of them because this vendor gives a lot of pose files with different options) do I have any more practical and quick options for getting rid of the unwanted AO nodes?

No other practical way other than using BagginsBill's VSSPR3 prop.

Yeah, use VSS and not only will you be able to get rid of AO in one click, but you'll actually have a skin shader that works right.

VSS it is then.  Thanks guys.

Normally I'd prefer not having to change what a vendor makes but in terms of shader set up...  good or bad it is their vision, however I just don't want to work with that kind of problem.

PS.  I did send the vendor a PM, I'm still waiting to see if they send any reply.

Darkening due to gamma correction.  Your original post had way too much specular lighting.

True... but at this point I'm kinda used to too much specular lighting.

That looks good, IMO. To compare to see what the specular effect is doing, set PM:Shine to 0.

If you want more specular, in the VSS Template_Skin, increase the PM:Shine Level parameter. In the absence of a specular map, VSS uses the color map to control the specular level. Since different maps have different overall luminosity, this means that there is no single universal value that does what you want with all texture sets. But the adjustment is trivial.

If you want more of a shiny/hydrated look, increase PM:Shine. This simultaneously modifies level and spread. Level is the brightness of the specular reflection. Spread is how broad the specular reflection is. I provide all three controls - level and spread as separate parameters to fine tune the balance, and shine as the overall control that modifies both.

To lighten the skin diffuse reflection alone, increase PM:Diffuse Reflectivity to .8 or .85.

To brighten the entire shader, go to the bottom and increase PM:Boost above 1.

To make the skin color map lighter, scroll to the right side of Template Skin and find the Color Map. Decrease the Texture_Strength. Be warned, though, that this can lighten eyebrows unacceptably if you do it too much.

To be able to seriously lighten a skin texture, even to the point of making it white, while preserving lip, makup, and eyebrow colors, get my Albino shader here:

http://sites.google.com/site/bagginsbill/free-stuff/random-shaders/VSSAlbinoSkin.mt5?attredirects=0&d=1

To see what that can do, search this forum for posts by me using the word albino.

I've played with it a little bit and skin reflectivity .seems to be the best way to go for the moment.  I saw what you meant about shine giving a shiny/hydrated (oily?) look.  Then for some reason I played with the color tint to see if I could get a good twiliek look going.