Hi, I saw your thread in General Discussion, and I’m assuming you’d like answers here.
Generally speaking, there are no ultra-strict rules when it comes to topology. As far as I understand, the recent trend is letting the rigging departments handle it, while modelers work on, well, modeling. The reasoning here is actually quite good - in order to know which topology works for deformation purposes, and which doesn’t, you need to actually have experience in creating deformations.
That being said, there are some ‘poles’, as you called them, in the neck and clavicle area, which really needn’t be there. The reason they are there (I’m assuming) is because a lot of your quads are stretching, and are forcing you to turn your edge flows (which should be with as few turns as possible). Oh and, think about using triangles in some places instead of poles if it helps simplify your flow, it’s not as bad as people say. Another rule of thumb you can safely adhere to is that ‘stars’ with more than 5 edges are a no-no.
The grid overall needs to be more homogenous (meaning the quads should be more evenly distributed), this is the main issue. What you did in the sternal notch area, and how you are driving the edges in groupings of 3 or more over the nose illustrates this issue. Also, a lot of your edges are zig-zagging between vertices, when they should not be changing the direction of their curvature. Modeling / retopology applications allow you to fix these 2 things with the relax function or its variants.
As far as the UVs go, making new cuts will usually change the textel density in some way, but afterwards it’s just a matter of, again, relaxing these areas (in the UV space).
Depending on your needs and goals, none of these issues may be ‘horrible’.
