I'll use Seraphina the dragon (minus wings) to show what's going on, because the problems are far worse for her. In this pic you can see that since I added an extra joint at the shoulder (lcollar and rcollar) the arms of my figures pose fairly well now. The fingers need work, but they don't show the crazy deformations that I get with other parts, so ignore them.

BTW, none of my figures so far have IK at all. IK just gets in my way right now, I haven't reached that skill level yet ;)