[Bf-python] How to obtain bone pose information?

[Tron Thomas]

To test exporting animation from Blender I created a simple walk cycle 
that consisted of just a set of hips and legs.  I had two IK chains, one 
for each leg, and an effector for each chain.  The only objects I had to 
set key frames for were the base bone that connected the two hips and 
the two effectors.  The animation was 60 frames long and only had 5 key 
frames for animated object (i.e the base base and effectors).

Because the base bone and effectors were the only objects that had key 
frames, I could not use IPO curves to determine the position for other 
bones that were affected by the key frames of these bones.  I could have 
baked the animation, and that would have created 6 times as much key 
frame information. I felt this was unnecessary and that I could get away 
with interpolating each bone between the 5 key frames already established.

What I would do in the last release of Blender as to set the armature 
into the pose for any given key frame and then determine how each bone 
in that armature was oriented in that key frame pose.  This allowed me 
to get the animation I wanted by only use 5 key frames for each bone.

With the new bones implementation, it doesn't appear that there is any 
way to determine the orientation of a bone in a pose.  It seems that the 
only way for me to get the needed information would be to bake the 
animation so that IPO information would be available for each bone.

This has two problems.  I have to make sure an animation is baked before 
I can be sure it will export properly, and I'm generation way more key 
frames than are really necessary.  How would I be able to export the 
same amount of information I used to in Blender 2.37 with what's planned 
for the new implementation?