While rebuilding the cage on top of everything may not seem to be the most time-effective thing to do, especially because I have ZBrush subdivision levels I could use, at least as a base. But my personal experience with ZBrush subdivision levels is they are too much hassle to work with. There are either way too many edges, or not near enough. And rerouting wires to suit deformation purposes, as opposed to even quads, is like untying the world's largest knot. I would much rather put all the ZBrush work into a separate Maya layer and template it (so I cant select it on accident), then build a new mesh from scratch. This lets me put points exactly where I want them, and use only what I need.
Another option I could do is use ZBrush's internal retopology tool. Granted, it's an amazing tool, and once I use it a bit, I'm really, really quick with it. The problem is (and I hope you're listening Pixologic) is there is no running triangle count to help me decide how dense is dense enough. Since it's super easy to retopologize, I tend to make stuff way denser than it needs to be. I'm talking a character I'm shooting to make 6k tris, I make closer to 10-11k. I want to make sure the game res mesh and normal map captures all the detail of the sculpt, so my mesh gets denser than my polycount allows. This wouldnt be a problem if my polycounts were higher (making next-gen stuff), but until then, I retopo in Maya. Maya's polycount is really helpful. Plus it's slower and more painful, so I make sure I'm only capturing what I really need.
Here are some pictures I screen cap'd after the ZBrush sculpted mannequin and the base clothes built on top of it.
