yes - exactly what Ticker wrote is my intention. It seems fine using o5m and merging with osmconvert however for right now.... If it's only a single tile no problems, but if its 2-X files - then you can only use keep-complete=false - or instead of using osm.pbf output in splitter o5m, and then merge the failed o5m tiles into a new input2.o5m and process that one again with splitter and lower max-nodes value. Instead if several input files are given and keep-complete=true (or default which is true) - then use keep-complete for each input file only.
I do run into another problem there on the huge tiles, will have to check on that later. Seems to be general about maps with very large tiles and not related to splitter.