as far as i know not much has changed with rigging. i don't know about bvh since i never was interested in using pre-made motion capture data. i always prefered hand made animations but with the recent kinect developments i might become interested in motion capturing aswell.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nr8vgCnb9_0http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Jc0mENG8Vshttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GCu8KTrC4sci just don't know how you would easily get nicely looping cyclic animations like walk cycles out of it but for some other things kinect could be awesome.
the brain needs visual hierarchies since it can't process too many items at the same time. way too many icons get crammed into a tight space in many applications. it also can be very hard to come up with descriptive images for a lot of 3d tools and functions.
this doesn't mean that blender couldn't make more use of icons where it makes sense (like in the tool shelf) but please not like truespace but more like modo.
