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The main change was DS2 letting the girls show a bit of skin (and the boys, but I don't care about that). So you needed a separate texture for each skin color. Was that really 22 colors? Or male and female maps differing and doubling the total?

I've done armors for Oblivion, which uses a separate texture map for the skin, and always uses the character's own texture for that. You'd think that would be a big factor in reducing the size of the program, but the way it works there requires a separate mesh for each color of an armor. The texture names are part of the mesh definition, instead of being in a template that points to both mesh and texture. So it uses less textures, but more meshes, and they cancel out. What makes it really dumb is that they do have templates, and use them to associate inventory icons and ground armors etc. but didn't take the extra step. Not Bethesda's fault, they inherited that mistake with the .nif format they adopted, unless the error was choosing that one.

Anyhow, most of the work in making those 22 for DS2 goes into the first one for each gender. If you have the base nude skins, then all the rest are just a matter of pasting replacement layers in Photoshop or GIMP.