Ima throw my 2 cent here.
I've been rigging as a hobbyist in maya for a few year, I can tell this software kinda babysit you when it come to rigging, you put parent constraint, ik, just by selecting your bones and hitting the tools you need.
In my opinion, this don't really teach you rigging, it a high level of rigging, but you don't really know what really happen under the hood, what kind of math is happening ? trying to look at your rig in the node editor just pull a pile of spaghetti that impossible to untangle, and add to that that you have a 'hierarchy' of node in the outliner, thing are not clear, constraint override bone position, controller, bone and logic are split into chunk of mess sprinkled with ton of transform node in between.
sure you may end up sorta knowing what you do, create python script to automate you rigging, end up tools that have been developed for decade like advanced skeleton, with their own tangled messy code that near impossible to decipher.
here come kinefx and apex : bone are point with a name and a transform attribute, hierarchy is build using primitive, your skeleton is just a flat list of point that you can manage the way you wish. apex look like a purified node editor, with a clear view of every transformation that happen in your rig.
You as the rigger, manipulate the raw transformation matrix in a meaningfull way, you understand what you're doing, you know what your rig is doing, you connect your node because you want to achieve a specific behavior : your fk ctrl are just a chain of parent xform passed one after another, use these same xform to build yourself an interpolation curve, sample it as you see fit, and you got yourself a spine !
all the graph of a rig can be read from left to right : no bullshit cyclic connection, once layouted automatically each column become a 'step' : you clearly see what node depend of what step, first the root, then the pelvis, then the leg and the spine, until you reach the tip of the finger.
I've learned more about rigging in these last few month than I ever did in the last 7 year in maya. matrix transformation are less and less of a secret to me !
put that in addition to the fact you don't need to put a single line of python code to build a rig, and that apex is naturally designed to build 'rig builder', you end up spending your time thinking 'how will that rig be built' rather than 'how to build that rig'.
The Autorig component system is amazing, every little bit of your rig now become a little module that you can then reuse into bigger one, the potential for sharing, updating, improving without coding is a new shift in how you build your rigging tool.
there so much more I love about kinefx and apex, it a powerfull framework and there so much to discover that even the dev at sidefx probably didn't think of !
I have so much more fun rigging from absolute scratch in houdini than using those blackboxed tool from maya.
the simple fact you have access to the entire library of sop node also allow for absolutely new way of rigging that could never be dreamed of in any other dcc ever !
it true that using apex today can be very frustrating tho, it in it early phase, and little tool to help the user exist, but if you go beyong what currently availlable and think of all the potential, this is a little price to pay for a futur that look promising.
hope that wasn't too much of a nightmare to read