Looks very nice and your experience will soon sort out the bones stuff. As you say it should be pretty much the same.
Nice Swirly light. This has some fun animating possibilities- It would have a hard time catching a ball
Although I would personally consider bulking out some of the arms and joints and widening the base. But that is more aesthetics than anything else.
For a commercial project I’d fix that and start over, for this lecture I might say “lesson learned” and go ahead with this small mistake.
A good approach, one that I should make an effort to pick up sometime. 
