Quote - Hello BH,
Just curious, when you say add more bulk to the calves to give it a more "solid" stance do you mean make the calf muscles more defined or "cut"?
(...)

Yes, I meant the calf muscles. Although on second thought I admit that's probably more a question of personal preferences than a necessity.

Quote - Im right now thinking Im gonna have to run the cuts all the way back up the arm to the shoulder and the arm pits in order to hide the resulting tris and produce the right topo for the knuckles.

For your triangle problem on the hand, maybe you could adjust the topology in a less drastic way, by "running your cuts" indeed to the back on the hand, where the polygon shouldn't need
to be morphed that much if you animate the model. And there being an area that's more of less "flat", having a triangle here (and a pole vertex, consequently...) shoudn't cause too many shading issues either.