Moving forward...sort of.

So my rigging, modeling and weighting changes have carried over in the over-written reference file the rig file is pointing to, now on to grafting controls, set driven keys and blend shapes. After all the time I spend skin weighting and animating the joints to various visemes I think I'm going to try my hand at blend shapes. There just needs to be more information in the topology and more bones and more skin weighting done to improve the deformations and I could probably get with not doing that by creating blend shapes. Also I get to learn about blend shapes work in Maya.