Best way to do repetitive rigging? I am trying to rig a flower which has multiple pedals. In order to save time, I want to rig and weight paint for only one pedal and duplicate those pedals.

The constraint I have is that I want the armature to be one armature, instead of having multiple armatures. This is because I am using this rig, outside of blender. Additionally, (although not required) I want to have the flower as one mesh.

The main problem I have with this is either 


When creating pedals in a different object then joining it together, since the vertex group names are the same when duplicating, the pedals just end up following the original bones that I have created
When creating pedals in edit mode, I can't manipulate the armature in edit mode so I end up having to duplicate the pedals first, then going to armature and duplicating bones, and weight painting for each pedal, which is a very long process.
So since no one replied, I guess writing a plugin was the best bet. 
In case if anyone wants to take a look at it, here is the link

https://github.com/shuao23/DuplicateToolsForArmature

Just a warning, there might be bugs so backup before you use it. Also its not super flexible so don't expect much :p