I'm hesitant to upgrade my CTA 1 to CTA 2 when I look at the difficulty in rigging characters. That being said, are there other apps that are similar, but offer better rigging or character creation tools? I'm ok with imperfect animation, as my look is a simplified southpark style.

If you really want to do south park style animations, CTA2 with the Buddy World pack will be your best bet. It is pretty much a direct ripoff from South Park.

If however you'd like to learn to draw/create your own characters, and learn how to rig them, Anime Studio Pro would probably be your best bet. It is more work to get something going in ASP over CTA, but in my opinion, it's well worth it.  You'll be able to do so much more with a real animation system as opposed to the highly limiting and frustrating CTA2.

iclone - iclone is actually great for that

southpark is actually made in maya -  they make 3D characters look 2D
  http://www.macworld.com/article/1165044/macworld_iworld_goes_on_down_to_south_park_has_itself_a_time.html

 here's a video i did in early ic5 to test the lighting, the new morphing tools and toonshading 

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I remember when South Park was done in lightwave way before they started using maya.  But regardless, 3D is way overkill for something as simple as south park, especially from an amatuer perspective.  I wouldn't want to try and come up with iClone 3D characters for south park characters, especially when drawing them is 2D is so much easier and faster.  And with a good 2D animation application, where building a re-usable rig is possible, you could still have the same quick turnaround time they have with SP in Maya.

actually,  i found it's easier than anything,  especially with all the old characters and new cc characters.  his main concern in his post is making / rigging characters,  ic6 is far easier for making characters than rigging in cta2 -   the toon shading is very easy to work,  and he'll have more motions than he can wiggle a mouse at.  to give that 2D effect,  all you really need to do is use 2D vector art type backgrounds that already have a 2D feel,  and kill the shadows, maybe saturate the textures a little.

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However, with Buddy World the OP already has access to a slew of South Park style characters without having to create or rig anything.  It also comes with a huge assortment of already made motions, and even has the pseudo-3D aspect of different viewing angles.  To be up and running right now, today, CTA2 and Buddy World would be the way to go.  Another option would be iClone but it would be a looooong time before you were productive with it. The best solution would be to use a real 2D animation app, and learn it so that you'd be able to move beyond South Park, and create your own inspiring 2D animations.

that's true too!    -  either way there's a local solution

for another 3rd party all 2D solution -  there's also https://www.toonboom.com/

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OpenToonz is another free 2D animation tool, which was recently mention on the forum: https://opentoonz.github.io/e/index.html. Apparently used by Studio Ghibli, one of the best.

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OpenToonz is pretty difficult to work with, and it's documentation and any tutorials are pretty horrible.  The hopes are the documentation would improve, but still the program is pretty difficult and challenging, and might not be a good starting point for a beginner.  Or maybe it would be, depending on the beginner I suppose.

after effects cc2015 has the cababilities to create and animate via webcam or any camera
making the charactors isnt all that hard if you have moderate Photoshop skill

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