Yeah, Human IK all the way. Full body IK and pinning any joint are pretty awesome features. I tend to hide the FK skeleton in the viewport because it doesn't update while moving the IK. You can still select the FK joint by other methods.
We're using Maya for rigging and animating, yes. We have an option that our teacher will rig our character, basically build the skeleton and controllers and everything, except skinning. We're looking for a substitute for that. Since our teacher uses his own rig building script that he made, we think that maybe a commercial…