I’m currently trying my luck at Source FilmMaker and after going through many tutorials and trying things out myself, I found a unique way of animating things that differ from the typical FK/IK trains the run in Blender/Maya/[insert programs here]. This reminded me of another nice tool in Daz.
I don’t expect anything soon but I can at least hope they get implemented into Blender at some point 
First in Daz, it has two different tools that perform roughly the same task: pinning joints, creating and disabling IK.
By default, Daz essentially uses FK rotation or you can drag and use an auto-IK; at any point you can press a key/button while selecting bones and then the bones will create a pseudo-target until it’s unpinned.
BepuIK essentially replicates this albeit less accurate: the FK bones pose/location should be saved/keyframed but you have to key the targets and the lock settings for it to animate properly.
Alternatively, it maybe possible to do this with targets and keyframed-temporary IK.
In Source FilmMaker there are 3 animation editor-tabs. There is 1) clip editor, 2) motion editor, and 3) graph editor.
Graph editor is essentially a dope-sheet with an f-curve/graph viewer.
Clip editor is like the NLA and Video sequence editors, where you position scenes and add sounds, image fx/filters/overlays, manage timing and etc.
But the unique thing is the motion editor. It’s essentially the graph editor but without keyframes. You don’t record points then edit curves to interpolate transitions, you record curves then smooth them out to refine the transition. It also has a feature called puppeteering where play the animation then move around the bone controls and record the motion and with a “floating modification layer” where until that’s saved, no changes will be applied.
In Blender (and SFM’s graph editor) when you try to record during playback, it will only work if there are not previous keyframes; if animation runs through an old keyframe it will jump to that instead of recording the new value (animation jitters between the two values)
The graph also has some commands to smooth/distort curves and adjust the timing.
It’s easier to understand by seeing it in action. Here’s the
on puppeering though the other videos and part 13.1-13.3 (pose-to-pose tutorials) will explain more about using the motion editor and the procedural tools (for editing the curves).
TL;DR
Daz has adjustable IK without needing to setup initial targets to work together.
SFM has recording without keyframes, recording during playback, and preview animation before applying it.
Anyone know of some other useful tools/techniques? I haven’t dove far into autodesk/other programs so I haven’t seen many things for me to wish Blender had (or had more accessible).