Hey Pharan, Erikari, thanks a bunch for answering the question and clarifying steps to potentially work around the issue. I really appreciate it! (you guys were so fast too, holy moly!) I'll take all of this into consideration and see if the pros outweigh this particularly heavy con in the long run.
It's really good to hear you guys are working on a solution. Having an intuitive way of doing this type of animation would really help Spine get out of the realm of the flatter character animations for the users that aren't willing to deal with the currently arduous process of setting all of this up properly, and honestly aside from this Spine has been a dream to work with in terms of both setting up and getting to the actual animating itself. Doing a video on this workflow specifically I feel is a great idea and would be a great way to show everyone how one would achieve this type of animation before the actual fixes are in place !

Hey there everyone! I've been fiddling around with spine for a few days as part of an assignment to figure out whether or not the group I'm working with should adapt the software, and I've run into an issue I was hoping to get your guys' insight on. It's going to be a huge wall of text so I'll be sure to post the TL;DR up front .

TL;DR - I can't seem to find a nice way to incorporate multiple poses in a single animation. The only way I've found to come natural to me seems to involve turning my rig into an outright monstrosity that nobody ever wants to touch anymore or write christmas cards to. I was wondering if anyone has any experience with this style of animation, and how they solve it within Spine themselves.

ahem allright, long version with pictures. Let's go!

The way we usually handle advanced puppeteering involves switching between several key poses, as shown in the idle > anticipation > hit frames here:  Loading Image
All of have their own unique parts and angles. I've been having a hard time figuring out how to set these poses up in the most efficient way without the rig turning into an absolute monster. To illustrate what I mean by thát I've taken some screencaps of both the tree and the in-spine setup pose for you guys to gander at. The result of what I'd like the animation to look like is this:
 Loading Image
The set-up screen looks like this:
 Loading Image
And the full tree looks like....a mess (ignore the random skin nodes, they're not relevant to the question):
 Loading Image
As you can see i have three rigs linked to this one root: the anticipation rig (green), the slash rig (yellow) and the idle rig (grey), which I switch in between during the animation by switching visibility between the parts. The advantage to this method is that it's intuitive to me - I just prep all three poses as you would normally without having to deform them all too crazily and presto - character is rigged.
The obvious downside to this (for me anyway) is the lack of elegance in the tree itself - it's really turns the into a terrible mess full of bones, and making a small adjustment just immediately feels clunky. The spine project loses most of it's logical structure, making it hard for others but the creator to work with it.

When trying to do everything in a single rig, however, I run into the problem of having arms in several different angles that I have to deform in the setup pose in order to have them properly allign with the bones. After testing this myself it felt like a slower and less intuitive process than the average Spine experience has been so far, and on top of that it was hard to quickly gauge wether or not I rigged the (now deformed) parts properly, since they were at a weird angle. Tweaking the poses using this method was a real pain in the butt, to say the least.

as an example I've added the arm from the anticipation frame to the rig in the 'one rig to rule them all' approach:

 Loading Image

I was wondering what you guys' thoughts are on this issue, whether you've already encountered this before, and how you ended up resolving it. I keep having this nagging thought in the back of my head that I'm missing something obvious. I figured the Esoteric software forum hive mind would probably have the answers if that were the case .

I hope this made sense!