Dan Fitzgerald

sanaldeep1996
in maya we have add influence option which helps use to add extra joint for weight painting without disturbing the exisiting skinning weight's

The workflow you've shown works in Houdini too, I've attached an example.

I'd love some of these additions as well, for your point 5 there are some APEX biped characters in the content library I've learned a lot from:
Electra: https://www.sidefx.com/contentlibrary/electra-rig/ [www.sidefx.com]
Luchador and Chicken: https://www.sidefx.com/contentlibrary/luchador-chicken/ [www.sidefx.com]

Here's one approach - I've added a switch and animated it to change which "goal" attribute gets copied to your start points, then in the popnet I've added an extra POP wrangle to update the particle's goal from the input. You can add as many shapes as you need to the switch and increment its "Select Input" when you want to start particles heading towards their next goal.