Hello, thanks everyone for your suggestions. Mickhah, my system setup is pretty good and subdivisions were set quite high. I was using an expression to drive a passive collider around a pivot and then a chain of dynamic constraints and rb to dangle a leg. One leg worked fine but as soon as i had to start dealing with the collisions of its neighbouring leg, the system would slow/glitch/crash.(I experimented with collision tolerance/distance to no avail)
I ended up creating 2 compromises, a dynamic curve and then an ncloth setup (only difficulty being constraining one ncloth to another) results aren't as 'ragdoll' as i'd like.