I just worked on a project in Maya that had some very complex facial rigs. I was flabbergasted to learn that we couldn't do *ANYTHING* at the artist level to make shape adjustments of even the most basic kind, until we got the rigger/TD (the excellent Lee Wolland) back in to build us a tool that would let us do it. This was considered normal by the Maya animators on the job -- they were surprised that I thought it would even be possible to, say, put a lattice deformer into the rig -- at any stage of the operator history.
I now understand why the animator/artist vs. TD divide is much deeper in Maya than Soft. Basically, the animators are powerless to do anything but set keyframes on the controls they've been given. Anyone with enough knowledge to do anything else is going to be kept busy with TD or rigger tasks. I guess it does let the animators focus on animation, but outside of an industrial-scale assembly-line shop, it makes for some enormous headaches.
