Actually, I've made peace with Poser's rigging system over this project. We don't have weight painting - big deal! You can't get realistic bends just with weight painting. You need JCMs  - or shapekeys or whatever else they might be called outside the Poser world - anyway.

It's not the rigging system itself that's lousy - it's Poser's support for setting up figures that is.

In other words, I vote for your second alternative.

-- I'm not mad at you, just Westphalian.