I've created a snake rig, with several B-Bones and a Spline IK constraint set to a Bezier curve which basically control the whole snake. I'm just wondering how to animate that curve without doing it in edit mode. I can imagine doing this with Hooks, and Bones parented to those Hooks which would effectively allow me to control the Hooks in Pose mode but I'll loose the access to the curve's Bezier handles so that's not good.

Reason I want to animate in Pose mode if it's not obvious is because I plan to have a lot more bones and control on this rig down the line and can't see myself jumping from pose mode to edit mode to animate the snake. Also it's convenient to be able to reset position and rotation, which I can't do in Edit mode.

How do advanced rigger deal with this kind of problem?