I've worked on the hatching animation more, here's a list of stuff that's been done:
-simplified the animation: more up to the point, symmetric, inspired by current in-game egg animation. Stays within bounding box.
-changed egg core rig to allow for mesh compression: used it to hide the egg after spawn and added a bit of stretch&squash in movement
-added gib mockups (stretching texture, nothing spectacular, but should give the idea. Didn't want to put too much time into it at this stage)
I think the gibs could look really nice if they had a rendered texture from fluid simulation with a few frames of animation on it, we could use normals and speculars on it, wouldn't have this fuzzy feeling of particles. I'm not sure if I want to go into it deeper at the moment, though, since I've never done SFX, and may end up locked in with a long, experimental, unusable piece of animation that's going to be ditched in the end.