Blood Dragon-ish Armor - Progress 3 - Unwrapping

I've finished unwrapping all the pieces of armor and merged all the torso pieces into one object. Right now, I'm applying base colors on the main body of armor to get a better idea of what the armor will look like.

The current torso texture resolution is 2048x4096, twice the size of the original (instead of 4-8x like with the weapons). The entire armor set is about 26,000 polygons; not bad.

There's a lot of UV stretching that I don't like for nearly all the pieces. My UV unwrap process goes like this:

1. Add Unwrap UVW Modifier
2. Manually create seams
3. Select each section of polygons (Select one polygon, expand selection to seams)
4. Pelt
5. Relax by Face Angles
6. Adjust if needed

This usually works and gives great layouts, but in some cases relaxing by either Edge or Face angles causes vertices to overlap or implode into nothingness. When that happens, I have to cut objects into more pieces than I'm comfortable with due to how much work it'll be to make them seamless later on. For the pauldrons, I had to add some seams and delete some unnecessary edges because they were throwing the algorithms for a loop.