I may have found the answer to my neck rigging. I found this link on jonhandhisdog.com (Jason Schlieffer) and folks there seem to be pretty excited about it. (so it must be good!) I haven't tried it yet, but I love the stretch, bend and smoothness - no snapping!!

I'm so glad, I was trying straight FK, spline IK and nothing seemed just right.

ElastIK

I just hope there are no glitches with Macs. I've run into mel issues.

[follow-up] Major glitch, the plug-in seems to be for windows only. I've emailed Michael Hutchinson the author/developer and hopefuly I'll get an answer. I also plan on following up on JS forum on how to recreate the smooth IK with native Maya nodes.

If not, I'm pretty sure a stretchy splineIK will be just fine.