I'm not an animator but I did try to design rigs that were friendly for animators to use. I think a good start would be:

• A more modern dope sheet. With better ways to hide and show smaller sets of parameters or body parts.
• The ability to toggle on and off automatically adding keyframes.
• The font size should be adjustable. It is way way too small.
• Something like tween machine, to make it easier to edit chunks of animations and fine tune them: http://justinsbarrett.com/tweenmachine/

I'm willing to bet that some of these things could be scripted or done as "addons". There's a fight in season 3, chapter 9 where Pyrrha is fighting Penny. I wrote a script that does the after images of Penny's daggers for the show. It was able to duplicate any number of daggers and set a delay for each dagger to perform the after images trick - it writes new keyframes for all the daggers.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_iq4xplqeI0

Go about 2:50 in and you'll see the dagger effect.

RT animates with Maya. It was already in use for modeling and other aspects of the show. There are a lot of softwares in use, it's not a Maya only scenario. There's no doubt that Maya is the industry standard, its taught in SCAD and a lot of schools that young animators are coming from. It's sort of like Photoshop, it's the industry standard for what it does, right? But there's no reason one can't use GIMP or Paint Shop Pro and produce results. The software is only as good as the person that uses it. Shane or Monty were able to produce awesome results because they are (or were in the case of Monty) very clever, talented and dedicated artists. The software that they used isn't as important as the artist behind the screen.

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