Personal i think this is using the software features to a greater degree not going away from it. So its very much “blender’s way”. In fact its even more blender’s way!
So first off, in general in any production you try and to the utmost get your models completed and approved before rigging 
this is usually the case and just good production practice regardless of software.
Also you never link/reference in your WIP file! Always publish it and the publish file is what is linked/referenced. So you may have dozens of versions of published files for a model/rig etc. That way your work data is separated from your published cleaned data. The artist can muck around etc but the publishing system makes sure the file is clean and tidy before getting used. This tends to work fine and i’ve used it in blender projects before very successfully.
However sometimes every now and then director wants to get model updated. There are number of ways to handle it. But if the model change has to be updated across all uses of the asset then this requires a rebuild/reskin. Often the rig is autorigged anyway and republishing the asset is basically rebuilding the rig with updated skin weighrts etc. In Maya this is doable but i find its a pain as the weights arent stored on mesh they are in a deformer called skinCluster and then you run into the whole dependency issue… In Blender however its in the mesh which is ideal.
Like a separate self contained object (using the programming term of object not an asset) Furthermore in Blender you can just delete an armature bring a new one back in and vtxgroup attach up again as long as naming conventions are maintained, this is a breath of fresh air in comparison to maya.
There’s a 3 part interview between David Hearn, the rigging lead on Next-Gen and Brad Clark (also chad moore) and they touch on this (http://techartjam.com/). They’re both rigging guys who understand both Maya and Blender. So they talk about the pros and cons. I trained and worked in producion in Maya and later taught and transferred my knowledge to Blender. Never looked back. Blender has non-destructive workflow. I can rig heaps faster in it and make edits post “approval” with a lot more ease.
On the point of everything separated and whether its worth it all i can say is you would be hard pressed to find a large studio that isn’t running things as granular as possible. When you are trying to manage 300+ people on a production you want to maintain as much non-destructive workflow as possible. Human error will be everywhere and want the ability to go back. This is not a big system. I’ve seen systems in maya planned out that are 15 or 20 times the size
One of the pains i mentioned before was specifically this. If you want to update skinning weights you need to go through a rebuilding process, granted there was lots of autorigging going on its still painful. Nice to just be able to transfer weights into vgroups and boom everything updates. The whole datablock concept in blender is very cool. Many things are compartmentalised not like in Maya where you have a giant dependency spider-web essentially. Another one, UV maps! decision made to update and change the entire UV map for a bunch of assets. In Blender just change it and republish. Or better yet create a new UV group and republish. Now you have both. Done. It wont effect anything else, its completely compartmentalised. Not so lucky in Maya!
