I was thinking about simplification in rigs today, and how we can modularize the joining of parts of the rig together – for example gluing together the upper arm to the chest via the shoulder. It would be cool to specify how this join would work e.g automated shoulder, stretchy shoulder, fk/ik etc
Charles Looker 
Hey Charles,
Interesting stuff… It’s interesting too because just up above you mention the balance between automation and manual control but here we see the actual solution; Sometimes you need to have it be automated and sometimes you need to have it be manual. 😉 what I mean is that both is the answer. You build the link to handle both automated and manual control and give the user the property to animate between them. The classic case for this is IK/FK. We see this all over. Even when we know we are not going to need it, Animators will always want to know that it’s there. 😉 I think we are going to be seeing this more and more as software becomes more open to the “Blending” of controls.