Great test!
The next build has tools specifically added to overcome your first problem. You can see I recently posted a cell division example to facebook (the one with the red/hairy cells) where the new cells have no artifacts, because the new cells are not actually derived from the split halves of the old cells, despite that being how it looks. What's happening is this:
I start with a clean geosphere and initialize it as cloth. Then after x time I convert back to geo, split with voronoi, and then (this is the trick), I spawn a new geosphere at the location of the voro fractures, convert those new geospheres to cloth and then wrap them to the voro fragments and delete the voro fragments. As they expand due to inflation forces, they don't take the shape of expanded voro fragments with wonky subdivided topology, but instead the perfect shape of the geospheres from which they were created. Rinse and repeat over and over.
The new "Move to Target" operator of the next build is what allows this, where you can tell particles to move to the surface point of the mesh of their target particle. This is how the wrapping is done.
So hang tight until the next build.
As for self collisions, hopefully solid mesh collisions will be added sometime in the near future so you won't have to worry about Particle Physics shenanigans for cloth at all. No ETA on that though.
The next build has tools specifically added to overcome your first problem. You can see I recently posted a cell division example to facebook (the one with the red/hairy cells) where the new cells have no artifacts, because the new cells are not actually derived from the split halves of the old cells, despite that being how it looks. What's happening is this:
I start with a clean geosphere and initialize it as cloth. Then after x time I convert back to geo, split with voronoi, and then (this is the trick), I spawn a new geosphere at the location of the voro fractures, convert those new geospheres to cloth and then wrap them to the voro fragments and delete the voro fragments. As they expand due to inflation forces, they don't take the shape of expanded voro fragments with wonky subdivided topology, but instead the perfect shape of the geospheres from which they were created. Rinse and repeat over and over.
The new "Move to Target" operator of the next build is what allows this, where you can tell particles to move to the surface point of the mesh of their target particle. This is how the wrapping is done.
So hang tight until the next build.
As for self collisions, hopefully solid mesh collisions will be added sometime in the near future so you won't have to worry about Particle Physics shenanigans for cloth at all. No ETA on that though.