I've gone through 4 different 2D rigging methods this week starting from scratch over and over on an animation.

If I rig from a neutral position like a t-pose I lose all the benefits of 2D animation being dynamic and expressive.

I don't want to draw EVERY frame individually, but I do want the option to get in there and draw something new at important moments.

If I rig from an action pose I can't re-draw the parts easily as the character spins around. I mean really, it shouldn't be hard to do this. The pieces of my characters aren't weight painted beyond just fully being set to the parent bone at the joint. But if I pose, then draw over a pose, then parent the armature, the stroke gets deformed after the parent application and ends up in the wrong place. Okay, so surely I can apply the inverse of the pose transform before parenting, right? NO! Blender doesn't expose this easily and so I've been trying to code a solution but it's not behaving as expected.

Fine so instead of bones I'll just have the body parts as separate objects? NOPE! Layering and masking doesn't work for grease pencil across separate objects, so there will be weird seams and outlines not working properly.

Maybe my mistake is trying to have one armature per character- but I want to be able to re-use limbs and have partial rotations (e.g. one leg facing forwards, the other sideways)- which would be straight up impossible if I had separate rigs for every angle.

Oh and there's the fact that if you make a mask based on something that uses a mask, it just straight up fails. So if your pupil should never leave your eyeball, and your eyeball should never leave your face, it can't figure out that your pupil shouldn't leave your face. This is driving me literally crazy, because I don't see a way around this without having to manually erase the leaking parts whenever the character turns their head, which seems like an utter waste of time.

I'm looking into toon boom harmony because blender just doesn't seem good for 2D animation.