I am starting to wonder if the handles are worth the price of loosing Drop to Floor (DTF). DTF is something that I find very useful at times. On the other hand, ever since I got Antonia, about the only thing I have done with the handles is to try to find ways to hide them!  

You have a very good point about the extra degrees of freedom offered by the hip handle. Personally whenever I run into a gimbal lock situation, I parent the figure to a primitive and use that for the extra degrees of freedom. Of course it is more convenient to have the freedom built into the figure, and it allows the the freedom to be included in a distributed pose.

Initially I thought that the breast handles were a good idea, but one limitation is that their influence stops abruptly at the collar/chest boundary, and this can look quite obvious when trying to use them for side-side movement. I have wondered if the functionality of those handles could not be better implemented by magnets, where the zones can span actors, and this is on my "to investigate" list. As to the other three handles, I have never used them, but perhaps that is because I do not understand their intended purpose. The one handle that I did have high hopes for, and would probably use very often is the one for the BODY. Much more convenient to have some actual geometry to click on, rather than waving the mouse wildly in space, hoping against hope to snare the figure circle, or as I usually do, use the dropdown menu.

Personally, unless some way can be found to solve the DTF problems, I'd give the handles the thumbs down. I think the DTF function is too valuable to loose for the sake of the handles. I'm going to make a simple test figure, to see if I can make any progress with the handle/DTF problems, but I don't hold out a great deal of hope.

As to the toecaps and brows. I think the toecaps are a great idea, and whilst I will leave it up to the texture people to decide how useful the brows are, I don't think they do any harm, as long as there is a Brows Gone morph. I was about to make a Brows Gone morph myself, but then you posted that you were including one in the next release, so I decided to wait.