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Hey !

You've finished it ! At least it's something.

Posing is not as hard as animating but it's already something not as easy as it may seem and stiffness is not such an easy task to get rid of.

The more you'll want to make your character/scene alive, the more complicated it will be to do, ligth, camera position, everything gets more complex as you add up technicalities. (Ok I don't even understand my own sentence there ... It's supposed to mean something but I lack the words).

Anyway, without rigging you won't have that much control to make things look good so I guess you just found limits in the tools you used until then.

As for the feeling of not so much of a big accomplishment well ... You've progressed VERY fast in the beginning so of course at some point you will feel like you're stagnating. It's a step further, but it's not a big step, visually speaking.

First, it's not as easy to have a realtime model look good than a pre-calculated one. The first thing I notice, is the very common, unepic lighting. The guy is bathed in light when usually you use way more contrast with light and shadow. Maybe you were fed up and wanted to finish this as soon as possible to move on, or you wanted the full model to be easily seen so we wouldn't miss any detail as viewers, but the result is that it makes it less interesting to watch. Which is a shame, as you're way better than me at lighting !

More complexity doesn't equal better that is true ! But as you've made your work around a good looking concept I don't think that's the problem. It's the feeling actually. You've had to work harder, yet you don't "see" if it's that much better than your previous work, but you're missing the point. Realtime is its own thing, and it takes time to find a satisfying result, and yours is actually good looking, but it took you probably more efforts, and that's where it hurts, but it shouldn't as you're less experienced and things will only improve from there.

Also, a sad thing with 3D is, the more you want to do, the very much more you will have to do (like insanely multiplied).

For instance, you've made a creature to encounter your character, and wanted to put a dynamic scene (as far as I understood), yet you found that it was a bit too big for you right now and lowered the complexity of your goal, good call ! But you found yourself with a bit too much to work with and no idea (no real idea at least) as to what to do with those damn goblins.

Now you find yourself with kind of a scene but with no real intention at all, no storytelling, the guy is kind of ambushed but actually is just facing two other guys in a totally blank space. Therefore you fell unsatisfied with it because it would have taken way too much work to have something satisfying (a bit of a forest environment, lighting coming through the leaves of trees etc.) and you should probably have get rid of those goblins so you can focus on your character (presentation wise). 

But how tough is that to just throw work in the trash ? So you were kind of stuck in a bad situation anyway cause your project was a bit too big ^^.

Hope that helps you feeling better about your work, because in my eyes it's definitely not bad looking at all ! But yeah I think you lost yourself in a bit too much at the same time and haven't found the right presentation that would make your model justice

Congrats on your piece, you've made it till the end, that's not nothing !

PS. I might have said offensive things here, but it's only due to my bad english so I apologize if I was unsensitive here.

IMO looking at the SW Battlefront 2004 ref, possibly some sort of recessed port whether a weapon or proximity LED?!

Too model that shape and match edge segments as well, just simply run another boolean operation (Union) & cleanup or free-form technique, I mean either method will do the trick.