The joint rotation / skinning concept is about compression and ability to playback a stored animation rapidly. It has also been done by storing the entire posed

The joint rotation / skinning concept is about compression and ability to playback a stored animation rapidly. It has also been done by storing the entire posed mesh per frame and interpolating between meshes. It follows from digitizing the articulated armatures of stop motion animation which preceeded CGI. Some of the first CGI was input using metal jointed armatures with potentiometers in every joint which is a form of 'rigid' transforms. I'm not sure what you are thinking about when you say it's not a great representation for processing animation data but I speculate that you mean it's not a great representation for how a flesh and blood creature moves and you'd be right. Advanced CGI can sometimes tackle a more thorough simulation of the musculature, complex joints, tendons, ligaments, and the physical dynamics of these all being controlled by a brain. A lot of soft body physical interactions as well. The sheer amount of processing and data needed for such a real simulation is why the cheating approximations are used for interactive simulations and games. See https://www.wetafx.co.nz/research-and-tech/technology/tissue https://www.wetafx.co.nz/research-and-tech/technology/tissue