Quote - To me, this is the intuitive way to go. Certainly I would and should like to know more about the bones/rig approach.

The face rig approach to expressions has several advantages over the morph based one, the main one being that it decouples your expressions from your mesh. This way you just have to build a decent face rig once, and after that anytime you need to have the expressions on an actual character, you just put this rig in a character's face, without having to recreate all the morphs from scratch everytime. eg in poser terms, imagine a 'unirig' that can be applied to all figures in the poserverse, that instantly gives them expressions and facial morphs and that can be used with BVH files besides. It's the same idea as using bones in the body rather then sculpting each pose by hand and has a lot of the same pros and cons.

Also note that for realistic and complex facial work, you need proper skin sliding, squash and stretch, skin dynamics etc. All of these things require that the mesh actually 'float' over an underlying structure of muscle and bone and not be moving directly with a morph. So you have no choice but to do facial rigs that control the structure which in turn controls the skin.

Quote - When Modo gets full CA plus hair/cloth, you combine it with their brush/sculpt engine and the powerful render engine....Modo could become seriously serious.

Modo's main problem is that it's stuck with the same people who never managed to give Lightwave decent animation, so God only knows what they're gonna do with Modo. They'v always been modelling and rendering guys, and this is why Modo is pretty good at those. For the rest, i wouldn't hold my breath.