Populating your game with people

For the first time a vr game I am developing requires more than 20 active character. So, I have 3 questions:

1) what would you do in in order to create diverse high quality human characters

2)Is it worth investing in animation tools like umotion/skele, 3dpuppet? I already own and do broad use of puppet master and finalik

3)What do you think I should opt to? I am capable and have created characters with a pipeline of blender/substance painter/marvelous designer +re topology in blender but I am far too slow and I don't trust myself.
Also, a colleague of mine owns character creator 3 and I gave it a try to create the main character, but I was disappointed that their instalod system doesn't work in unity (was kinda bought in this idea), is it worth sticking with something as expensive over Uma?

 

I'm right now just using mixamo ( now adobe fuse beta ) to get the base male/female skeleton/mesh.
Then it's pretty easy to resculpt the face to your needs and you can use the provided blendshapes to breath some life into the faces. Then I use substance painter to add details to the exported textures. I tried DAZ3D but it uses lots of different materials for each part of the body. To edit cutscenes I can recommend umotion. You can just move the IK goals and it will do the rest.

 

I 've tried mixamo and it is great (and also my failsafe ), I 'm giving daz3d + uma a try to see if everything works out atm.