IMO, weight mapping at the moment would be a serious disadvantage. Don't get me wrong, I love weight mapping. It's such that Mil3 / Mil4 characters are poly heavy and trying to weight map shoulders and hips are not much fun, to put it mildly.

I was studying wrap deformers a while back and that looked pretty promising. The catch is that you need a low poly cage (1k - 2k polys) to drive your higher resolution mesh. But wrap deforming in conjunction with weight mapping is a fast and elegant solution because it takes almost no time to weight map such a lo-res character.