>> Some programs can automatically calculate this kind of separation for you in their UV editors, for example I'm pretty sure someone has mentioned Blender can do it. But I'm not familiar enough with its UV editor to be able to give you the details.

Yes, you can usually do that in UV editors, by selecting the parts you want to UV and where the seams will be. I was more thinking at some sort of "pre-process" during the creation of UV map with UV nesting. It's some sort of "lazy" solution... ;-)