Yeah, ragdolls are a real limitation on making things look good at this point, ironically (since they were supposed to be hot stuff for realism). The problem is that once you ragdoll something, you are done animating it. You can't guarantee that it's going to be in the right position for an animation to look good, make sense, or avoid major major clipping problems. So characters can't die and recover. You're stuck with two worlds: an animated world, and a world of dynamically simulated physics, and they don't mesh very well. There are solutions, but they are pretty drastic at this point.