Thanks for the detailed reply Christophe. That sounds like an excellent solution. Thankfully, the secondary parts that need to be animated in our case are not as complex as the cloth parts that you described. Many of the pieces are using a single bone and just need to “jostle” around somewhat convincingly. The remaining secondary parts are simple bone chains.
I noticed that you’re at Tencent in Boston. If you run Eric Chadwick, please give him regards. Jon Hanna was actually my boss some years back. I believe that he’s currently at GlobeX.