Heres a plugin I would HIGHLY recommend. Its call Orthopedics for Lightwave and its the closest thing to Messiahs setup mode in Layout. I never use skelegons anymore and this plugin brings all the functionality of skelegons into layout. I simply draw bones in layout without any of the hassles of bank handles and worrying about which viewport I drew skelegons in. The plugin allows you to edit joints, split and fuse bones, copy and mirror heirarchies, rename bones, parent and unparent in various ways. Best of all you can totally rig in layout and tweak the bones instead of jumping back and forth between modeler and layout. Its now very easy to reuse rigs with this plugin and best of all its only $65 bucks.
http://www.irrationalnumber.com