Blender IK Confusion

I’ve been making pretty good strides in learning Blender. I’ve figured out a lot about rigging, I’m not confident in weight painting yet but I get the concept. Last night I started learning about IK constraints. I already know what IK is, just learning how to do IK in Blender.

And it’s… pretty simple? I understand the IK chains, I understand the pole bones, etc. It’s all… pretty straightforward. It’s even easy to do FK posing while the IK is active. I’m sure I have more to learn but…

Why does everybody insist on dual rigs? Every tutorial I see strongly encourages you to use a dual rig, that is to say a rig for FK and a separate rig for IK, then blend between them. This seems… extremely overcomplicated and unnecessary? Why do people do this? What am I missing?

My current best guess is that older versions of Blender maybe weren’t as good with FK and IK interacting with each other so the dual rig with blending was necessary. But it doesn’t seem at all necessary nowadays and the practice persists. If anyone knows why the dual rigs are so popular, I would love to hear it.

The good news is next time I get back to Blender work, I think I am ready to animate. Gonna make myself an idle animation! I also need to look into how animation blending works in Godot…