Poly-controlled partial evaluation (PCPE) is a flexible approach for specializing logic programs, which has been recently proposed. It takes into account repertoires of global control and local control rules instead of a single, predetermined, combination. Thus, different global and local control rules can be assigned to different call patterns, obtaining results that are hybrid in the sense that they cannot be obtained using a single combination of control rules, as traditional partial evaluation does. PCPE can be implemented as a search-based algorithm, producing sets of candidate specialized programs (many of them hybrid), instead of a single one. The quality of each of these programs is assessed through the use of different fitness functions, which can be resource aware, taking into account multiple factors such as run-time, memory consumption, and code size of the specialized programs, among others. Although PCPE is an appealing approach, it suffers from an inherent blowup ...