Anyone by chance know how to remove points or edges without deleting the surrounding geometry. Dissolve works pretty well on the model...but the uvs get jacked up.

Hard to say without any reference images or scene file, but try transferring the UVs back after the Dissolve.

Dissolve seems to preserve UV's pretty well

except for when you are dissolving edges on UV seams, which logically creates an impossible situation where the resulting polygon that used to be 2 polygons, separated by seam edge, living in 2 different UV locations, would now have to receive the texture from 2 different discontinuous UV areas, so you will see it stretch across instead