EN: Advancements in Facial Animation

As my final project will be a character driven story I have to decide if I am going with real actors or digitial ones. As my time is limited I actually already throw out the digital actors idea - I already have modeled one character and have started to rig her but what really made me stop was the facial animation part.
I can trick a lot with the actual body movement set certain camera angels etc but what I would not get is any realism or any believability in the face on my own in less then four month. The idea got scraped but still for a future project I want to cut out the real life actor - or at least just use real actors for motion capture.
So when I watched the second part (fast forward to about half the movie) of the last videopodcast from the cgchannel (its big) I was extremely impressed with Softimages new program called FaceRobot. Not that it will ease the pain of the actual animation parameters much but the solver for muscles and layering animations and the whole setup process is taking about half a month out of a good facial animation - yes you heard it right about half a month time spend on setting up the character is solved in about 10 - 30 minutes with this program if it works as shown in the demonstration (which uses a pre-configered mesh so milage may vary). Then again there is the price: $14,995. Yes that puts us back to square one in the 3d pricing. I really thought we are away from the astronomical prices of the past in the 3d market - especially since Softimage is touting its "3Democracy" with pricing their flagship product in the sub $1,000 dollar range. Now fifteen-thousand dollars won´t get them a foothold in the market that has less and less money anyways - so for now at least facial animation is still hard labour for the small indy studio and I think companies like pixologic with its groundbraking z-brush tool might fire another shot in that direction soon - one hopes.

Update: I read the wrong price. The $14,995 is only for the animation part of the tool. The designer with the aforementioned solver is $94,995. Excuse me thats ONEHUNDREDTHOUSANDDOLLARS for a piece of software thats gonna be absolute with the next version in a year. Are they kidding?