Quote - Best I get a really good handle on rigging, then.

Was that pun intentional? :-)

It seems to me that weight mapping should be more efficient than other methods of joint parameterisation, as well as more flexible. Rather than having to work out the fall-off zone's effect on every vertex for every transformation, you just look up each vertex's weight map value and you're done. Your machine would need to do less thinking on behalf of each figure in a scene. (Is that true?)