I've seen it work before on the Bermuda sloops in-game, and that only involves locators, I believe.
Have a look at SloopBermuda_rey_a3.gm in GM Viewer to see how the locators are arranged.
To fix the sails' orientation with the wind, that's where you need to use TOOL to change the XX directional coordinates to -1, for the geometry locator of the yard.
That reflects the yard in the x-axis, which causes reverse lighting, but also makes it swing around as if to catch the wind, rather than trying to remain parallel to it.
There's a workaround to rectify the reverse lighting, which I can describe in detail if you need it.
The best way to fix it, though, is to reverse the normals of the yard model in Maya, so the lighting is corrected in-game.
Anyway, I see what you mean about making yards move with the sails as they furl up/down, but I'm not sure it's possible.
I've never tried it practically, but the way I understand it, the ropes only move with the sails because they are put into the same locator group as the sail locators.
Geometry locators, however, use up the locator group with the name "geometry", so they can't be attached to the sails in the same way.
What would happen is the extra yards should remain static, regardless of the sail state, unfortunately.
(when you're more awake, of course!)
