That’s another possible solution- I’m not in love with the “cannot manually edit them in the UV editor” part, so I’m going to try StrayBillie’s idea first. If that doesn’t work, I’ll do it your way, since the “split each island into its own object” still has the limitation of 8 maps per object, which simply is not enough (although worst comes to worst, it’ll have to be). One way or another, I’ll get past this, I’m just hoping to do so in a way that still lets me manually manipulate UV coordinates.
Or, I could always try and recompile the source code to give myself a higher limit, as this limit is frankly ridiculous. The info I found about it said “it takes a lot of memory” and “it can slow performance”, which I’m inclined to disagree with, as I currently have 120 UV maps in this scene with no performance loss and a whopping 225 MB of memory usage 