[ISOcGAxAgO]

I agree with your take on this. Facebook has done considerable work with their Detectron / Dense Pose projects which can UV unwrap human bodies using AI. (https://github.com/facebookresearch/DensePose) Another is the smpl / smplify-x project (https://github.com/vchoutas/smplify-x)

Further, by utilizing generated (synthetic) data with 3d scanned human models, or generating your own with something like makehuman or daz3D, you should be able to find a way to UV unwrap a distorted sphere. I've had a lot of success with generating synthetic data like this with Blender 3D and training various neural networks (Mask RCNN / Deeplab for example) with various combinations of this synthetic and real datasets.