If you don't mind me asking how far into you learning animation in Blender? I know animation can be tricky but one thing that has massively helped out the smoothness of my animations and create a more natural movement is learning inverse kinematics in detail.

Even though yes weight painting can be a pain in the arse I highly recommend learning manual weight painting over addon tools like rigify. Maybe I'm just weird, but I find when I break everything down to the bare bones ( Aha bones ) I get a much better understanding of everything than if I rely on complicated addons that can easily go wrong and be very fussy if you don't set them up in an exact way the developer intended.

Hope you don't mind me chiming in, thought this post looked interesting as I'm learning animation in Blender myself, found the tutorial above really helpful even though it was barely a minute.