I have some experience in this field with my knight object (poser G2 Simon).
While it is true that the object is made of 88 groups, it has only 34 materials (a lot of different textures for the armour in this case.
The pose body only used 14 materials, which consisted of only 4 image maps. Head, eyes, body and hair.
However, while you only need to load 4 textures, you still need to apply them to all the different parts.
I used PoseRay to convert the groups to materials, changing the need for 88 nodes to 34.
I don't know how to get that lower in PoseRay or in Poser...
So you might not need to cut the object is as many parts as you think, but I guess you still need more that 16 nodes to cover all the body parts with only a few image maps in a lot of cases.