Flexing Your Wires?

As a technical director for Lights Out I've had to rig nine different robots for animation. One of the new things (for me personally) I did was add some automation to loose-hanging wires, cables and other dangly stuff. I did this mostly with the use of stretchy bones, the flex modifier and the spring conroller.

What did this do to the animation, the production and with the animators?
In some places I had not set up the spring controller properly and so if the character moved to fast the wires or other things with spring on them would go haywire. This was fixed in some instance by going in and tweaking the numbers individually for each scene before render and in some other cases in post production. 
Production-wise it saved a lot of time since the animators didn't have to animate a lot of small wires and antennas. What the animators really thought of it I don't know but the impression I got was that they didn't like the lack of control it gives but they did like the fact that it saved them some work.

In the future I need to device a system which allows for both autonomous  animation as well as hand animation on top of that.