No need to apologize, all is well! 
Setting up that head was a playfull half an hour, but only because of a few rendertests. Once you know what you’re going for, it’s a matter of seconds of putting the pieces in. You can also simply work out one half it and mirror your setup to the other side. Whenever you add something like a “muscle”-bone and its target, you can just mirror it over. That speeds it up tremendously. Not to mention that the setup mode allows you to do your animationtest and adjust things at any time afterwards, keeping your animation, you can even change the geometry if that’s what it takes, but in this case it was extremely simple.
I guess the “option” for the bones could be called either a straight forward ordinary bone, or a muscle-bone, which requires to put in a target for the bone to stretch and orient to. These are build in features of the bone system and therefore are very simple. The mirror action includes the mirroring of the target automatically as well, so you don’t have to worry about that at all. Besides, due to it’s flexible nature you can use anything as a target, including other bones. This way you can create chains of deforms as well!
As for the rendering, there are a few things that it only needs to compute ones, which it does in a millisecond preprocessing but it saves a lot of operations for each point. After that, the mapping is done at rendertime of course. This technique allows to not only map images flat along a bone, but to even twist it based on the “muscle”-bones original orientation and the targets rotation. This is very powerful due to the fact that none of the mapping is flat, but instead it is volumetric and can remap procedurals as well as images.
The only drawback at the moment is, that there’s no openGL displacement YET! So in order to see what your displacement looks like you have to render it. The big advantage in messiah:Studio is, that it renders incredibly fast, even with GI turned on at decent qualties. For such tests, although this might be considered silly, I actually have mostly everything turned on…gives me the final look right away. Depending on the level of complexity of course…if a render takes more than 30sec I switch the GI off for the tests…haha… 
I will prepare a simple tutorial that will show exactly how to set all of this up, and the only reason why I havn’t really done such a tutorial yet is because I’ve started to take the simplicity of it for granted a long time ago and it’s difficult for me to realize that people simply don’t know about it or can’t imagine how comfortable it is. That’s sort of a general problem I have…I apologize for that myself.
