Help with Multiple Skeleton Meshes

Hey guys! So i have a fundamental question for my team.

I was using the State Machine to make some of my Skeleton Meshes work when something came to my mind:

Some of them have custom bones, like gadgets, giant shoulder pads (or none), that kind of stuff.
Which alternative will make it less painful later on regarding the project:

Inserting the gatgets in the skeleton, making the one Animation blueprint a giant thing
(also, I don’t know how it’ll affect importing and if they’ll share the same animations with different bone structures later in other meshes)

OR

Using Socket points for other Skeleton meshes (attaching them to the Primary Skeleton Mesh) and making different Animation blueprints with custom animations for each of them.

I think the second alternative is better suited for what we are going to do, but i need a second opinion.

Thanks!

I’ll use socket way 100%, just the most flexible, scalable way to proceed imo.

Thank you for the answer!