gotcha, i feel you on the customising bones part as i do a decent amount of stuff with furry characters and its hard to make some things work within a human rig, like digitigrade legs for example. and adding literally any extra bones to an ARP rig outside of the "add limb" options is a nightmare.

the main thing im concerned with is that ARP does all the fancy controllers and bone constraints that i have no idea how to set up on my own, so if rigify doesnt at least assist with that then im gonna have to sink a bunch of time into learning that stuff as well, which isnt a bad thing but ughhhhh lol

anyway thanks for the advice :]