It would be great to eliminate Controls rigs or minimise the controls needed on a rig, and just select the mesh directly to animate. The best way to do this (There are a number of hacks out there to accomplish this, but they have major performance drawbacks) would be to create a map type and simply paint maps on a mesh like skinning maps (would also be cool to have a best-guess algorithm that is configurable per rig-type that would auto-color it and get you 80% of the way there before painting). Each colored section would represent a control to be mapped to.
![Autodesk Design & Make Report](https://forums.autodesk.com/t5/image/serverpage/image-id/1350519iCB55845EBFC43016/image-size/large?v=v2&px=999" "Autodesk Design & Make Report")