Thanks 0rAngE, fingers crossed I can get the tension maps working here as well.
Eyeball safely back in socket:
I plan to regrow the brows and lashes using hair particles, though the mesh ones don’t look too terrible here. I had another crack at improving the eyeball (couldn’t leave it alone), and not only did I manage to remove the offending corneal shadow and simplify the sclera/cornea blend, but in the process I eliminated a whopping 11 nodes!
Conversely I had to add a few more to the skin material since Random Walk was insistent on the caruncle being dark maroon with a hard black edge, so I gave in after a couple of days wrestling with it and blended the SSS into another SSS with different settings. It’s an extra bit of complexity I was trying to avoid, but I need to move on… 