hi pastclay
I love blender but i use daz3d for the animations.I am currently using daz3d 4.0 and 3.0 .Haven't downloaded the latest one though.The morphing abillities that daz3d has are phenomenal ,You can change the base mesh to anything you want if you know how you use the morphing dials correctly.
I used daz3d for my sprites some time ago ,but i decided to switch back to good old vector and pixel art.Daz3d is great for creating sprites ,but it's not that good for small sprites.Everything goes blurry under 128x128.