I thought about doing the paths that direction but for large spheres I wasn’t sure it was a good idea; the southpool runs the risk of lots of overmilling… but I can ponder it more… especially if you can do the whole thing as one or 2 G code commands (not unreasonable to have a separate command for equator-to-pole and pole-to-equator)
as far as the number goes, likely just moving with a single stepover (measured at equator) cold work