You can use “Grow from seeds” effect with intensity masking to segment structures that have similar intensity, similar to this:
The difference for bone+cartilage segmentation are the followings:
Set the editable intensity range (using Threshold effect) to include cartilage but exclude soft tissues as much as possible (to avoid the segmentation leaking too much into soft tissues).
Use “bone”, “cartilage”, and “other” segments. You would put small seeds in bone and cartilage. You would use the “other” segment to paint seeds into soft tissues that are within the intensity range that you specified (to prevent them to be added to the the cartilage segment).
Thanks for the update. It seems that you are on the right track.
You can try lowering the editable intensity range value to have less holes in the cartilage (of course that may bring in more noise from surrounding soft tissues).
You may also try to disable editable intensity range when you are done with the region growing and apply smoothing to fill in small holes.