I think the point of the video is about how an animator can express himself without going too technical into the rigging. Like making a model and do a quick rig to practice animation.
It’s different from a production rig where you need this rig to do a lot of stuff, linked into many shots and with many people using it.
Then you may need to add more bones to extend functionalities, to be able to tweak the rig or add stuff without breaking things.
Also it may be possible to get a production rig and stay minimalist in bone count but that may need more scripting/cheating/driver stuff , so it doesn’t go much into the "easy rigging " principle. And may not get your life easier as a rigger too.
The more complex/big the project will be , chances are that the rigs and many other things get bigger and complex too. If you’re only modeling and posing a character, a simple FK rig is enough without constraints at all, then the simple rig of Pepeland seem over-complex for this task.
All that said I found very interesting and quite inspiring Pepeland’s talk, it would be very interesting to come up with a workflow where parts of the rigging could be automated into the shots, or with using sculpting tweak like he do on the face, ATM it’s hard to do it on blender with linking system, but it’s great to see such experiments.
About Bbones I think it’s a very great addition, and they extend and simplify the rigging quite a lot in some cases,
I’ve came across this bug : https://developer.blender.org/T48988
I hope that can be solved at some time and it will be perfect…
About bone based facial rigs, it’s great and extend a lot the tweakability of the rig, but you can still manage to have very nice/similar results with shapekeys and lattices.
I have to investigate how it’s done in BlendRig, but in my case I had to put several constraints and action-constraints to automate things like smile/frown,o shapes and this still need corrective shape keys on top of it…
I found that’s not worth it in many cases, unless you’'ve got many time to spend on the rigging and aiming at the top blockbuster quality.
In the other hand what Pepeland has done in his video seems quite faster to come with than having good shapes that works… So I guess it depends a lot on the case still.
About rigging ressources online, you can look into humane rigging, and mancandy FAQ for the facial rig. Stop Staring, the book by Jason Osipa is a must read if your serious about this subject. They all cover a large aera of the rigging, teaching how to do things and why. It’s true that there is not much great free ressources about rigging. Long time ago there were BSOD (blender summer of doc) about rigging that was worth checking, but I guess now it’s quite old …
Cheers…