its not a silly question although a multitexture shader is the best way to get a terrain to look great you could try making one big terrein and then breaking it up like you sugested. are you using a mdl terrain or is it hmp. and i dont know weather this hlps but you could try lookiong at detail textures or chunked terrain, this is what the manual has to say:
"Tiled detail textures for the second skin can be used to give huge terrains a high texture resolution. Different textures for patches of rock, grass, paths etc. can be mapped onto different parts of the terrain, using the standard multitexture terrain shader included in the template scripts."