the only other issue i can think of is one that you won't run into for this particular project.

if it's working for you this way then by all means go ahead. i just thought it odd to have overlapping UVs on the same model reading off the same texture map when the islands are spread across different [0,1] squares and they don't look like each other.
just looks like you should be getting the wrong textures coming up where you don't want it to be. but i guess if everything is where it should be then you've done something right.
it sounds like what you've done has given you fewer nodes in the hypershade and a project directory that doesn't take up much hard disk space since a lot of the textures are repeated as you said.


what does your colour map look like?