I consider Graphmate and Keymate essential to doing manual animation. Animate 2 allows you to assemble animation blocks, but there is a limited selection of animation blocks available. If you want to manually create new animation or mix your own animations with animation blocks then you need Graphmate and Keymate. Studio will smoothly interpret between poses at different key frames, but this sometimes results in overshoot and weird or jerky looking motions. Grahphmate lets you see graphically how each pose parameter is changing as a function of time and allows you to add more key frames to fix the motion.