With 2.8 just around the corner, it’s pretty much set in stone that the next in trunk rig will be the pitchipoy rig. Not that it’s a bad rig, but it tends to lean too much into the spaghetti squash and stretch philosophy for my liking. I also have had a really unhappy time trying the get the inverse kinematics to not go bat shit crazy in “extreme” posing.
So dose anyone know of any other rigs out there that behave/opperate more like the original metarig?
By Pitchipoy I assuming you’re meaning the Rigify rig?
I tend to like the Rigify rig myself, I’m fairly new to 3D animation but I understand the concepts, coming from 2D.
Here’s a scene I hand animated where I feel I pushed the rig pretty hard. Obviously someone with more animation experience could do a better job but I feel the rig worked quite well.
I’ll admit I haven’t tried any other rig but the Rigify rig since moving to 3D. And I’m sure there are tons of presets, buttons, and dials I’m not using to the best of their ability. But I can assume a good rig is a simple to use rig, right? 
Tim
The new Rigify rig (Pitchipoy as it’s also called) is the one I’m referring to. If you used a previous installment of Blender you would have been using the old Rigify rig made by Nathan Vegdahl. It was the one he made for Sintel (Blenders 3ed open movie) if I’m not mistaken.
I had a lot easier time rigging and animating with it, and other than the forearm “popping” I didn’t have any serious issues with it.
It is quite possible that I’m missing some tweak or toggle somewhere, or I’m rigging in such a way that it’s upsetting the rig in some way. But as you pointed out, an easy to understand rig is usually the best rig.
EDIT: Oh and nice animation BTW. A little stiff, but otherwise not bad.
I’m really interested in the subject and I hope more animators chime in on this. I’m finding that in 3D the rig is at the heart of the animation. I would like to hear the opinions from the people using them everyday, and why they chose one over the other.
I saw someone posted a video the other day of an experimental rig that Disney is working on. It looked really promising. I noticed it had pinning options for contact points and also the ability to re-time portions of the rig at the rig level. Hope it trickles down to us pee-ons 
Thanks for the critique on the video. After rendering it out in real-time and with the cloth sims, I’ve been going back and working on the floaty part and the stiffness, like you noticed. Learning really quick that 3d animation isn’t just plug and play. In a lot of areas it considerable more challenging then 2D. Some many things can effect another that you spend so much time just trying to dial in you sequences.
Tim