Quest to learn 2D animation in After Effects Pt.5

Having pinned the first character I found that it would be tiresome to animate multiple characters due to the poor navigation of the series of layers to access the position and rotation of the pins. Remembering back to some advice that Jason gave me, he mentioned a tool called PuppetTools3 which would make the entire process of rigging and animating a character much more simple than it currently is. Looking at the website I found out that the tool that he recommended isn't free and since this is a project and unsure whether this is a tool I would be using again in the future I couldn't justify the investment.

Looking for alternatives I stumbled upon my next tutorial "Summit 41 - Adv. Character Rigging - After Effects" by Matt http://goo.gl/ZSzRPb

In this video I discovered the free tool called "Duik" http://duduf.net/?lang=en which offered a wide variety of tools which after using found to have an easy learning curve in regards to rigging a character. While you traditionally insert pins into the character to allow animation. With Duik you insert the pins as usual, but the tool has the ability to create nodes for each pin which can then be chained to create an IK limb. 

By using the Duik toolset and applying what I've learnt from both tutorials so far I have been able to create the following basic walk cycles.