You made mention in your first post of AM. A 'famous' quote of Martin Hash: "Animation is hard". Pretty blunt, but pretty accurate. And that's coming from a phd who had Catmull as his advisor ;) The skill set required if you want to do all steps yourself is just huge. Modeling, texturing, rigging, animating, lighting, any one of which you could spend a career and a life time mastering. Fortunately, us mere hobbyists have Poser which allows us to skip the modeling, texturing, rigging and to some extent the lighting and animation, but at the end of the day it's still hard, damn it! ;)