http://www.kotaku.com.au/2012/02/confirmed-sega-studios-australia-makes-37-of-its-staff-redundant/#comment-541761 I hope those affected land on their feet.
try modifying the beard normals to be like the face normals to vet better integrated shading, like so: http://simonschreibt.blogspot.de/2013/02/airborn-trees.html
For the joints I was just thinking about this: http://www.pig-brain.com/tutorials/tut02-02/ It might be kinda old though and I'm no pro rigger/animator.
in this tutorial you can see the subD mesh (wireframe) which gets animated... and the displaced one for rendering... http://henningsanden.com/2013/02/27/zbrush-to-maya-displacement-map/
David JAffe posted the initial designdoc for this on his blog a little while ago, interesting read : http://criminalcrackdown.blogspot.com/2007/02/calling-all-cars-game-design-document.html