Yar, a good good thing it be. Speaking as one of the great unwashed CG animation students who graduated in the late '90s from a school which DIDN'T particularly emphasize traditional skills, I can tell you how hard it was to get a job that way; techinical skill, but no formal grounding in design, drawing, or anatomy. If you don't get it at school, count on having to spend more time and money afterwards to aquire those skills, or you're pretty much toast. It's no fun to graduate AND THEN go back to school. Actaully, it's probably a good idea to find yourself some extra figure drawing groups outside of school anyways.
And to each their own inspiration, but I guess my love of the Muybridge stuff is not so much in how many keyframes and poses it gives you, but rather the overal demonstration of the body in motion, and the understanding that gave me of just how weight transfers and the body moves in and out of balance. You might never really need to animate a guy baling hay, but no matter how many times someone tells you the pelvis is generally up here at this point, and swaying left there at this point, for me I found that there was no substitute for SEEING it, and being able to step through the how and why of motion. Plus they're just plain gorgeous vintage photography