Additional research turned up this Matt Cutts video which addresses my question head on:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZjRGkc__FwQ

A site we're working on has hundreds of thousands of inventory pages that are generally "orphaned" pages. To reach them, you need to do a lot of faceting on the search results page. They appear in our XML sitemaps as well, but I'd still consider these orphan pages.

To assist with crawling and indexation, we'd like to create HTML sitemaps to link to these pages. Due to the nature (and categorization) of these products, this would mean we'll be creating thousands of individual HTML sitemap pages, which we're hesitant to put into the index.

Would the sitemaps still be effective if we add a noindex, follow meta tag? Does this indicate lower quality content in some way, or will it make no difference in how search engines will handle the links therein?

Additional research turned up this Matt Cutts video which addresses my question head on:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZjRGkc__FwQ