Just to throw a curveball into this, have you tried looking into how vector coupled kinematics are set up? In short it's a more procedural approach than the more known IK / FK methods, can try to dig up some links later on but definitely check it out if you are coming from softimage and are not already trained in the Maya IK/FK defaults.
It may negate your search, sorry for not having a snippet at hand to send your way at the moment, but it does sound like you are after more dynamic interactivity than driven keys or script jobs can offer, vector coupled was originally concepted with Maya in mind but the approach works regardless of software, can't disclose where but it's been used on a few notable films in the last decade without entering mainstream social media communities. As always, hope this helps in some way -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Python Programming for Autodesk Maya" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to python_inside_maya+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/python_inside_maya/E3F2FA2D-A202-4A00-9971-03C7FAD356BA%40gmail.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.