---> Point
.

.
--> Head

The irony is your post applies to you.

What do you mean, content? There's a reason AAA games are made by hundreds of people - people who design every fucking pebble on the road that you never stopped to notice. Or the cigarette butt in some ashtray.
Yeah, automated tools - procedural generation are slowly conquering that field, starting with the omnipresent SpeedTree and other tools. Still the bulk is still hand-made. Games simply have become tremendously detailed - from environments to facial animation.

Take for instance motion capture - it's nowadays expected to see fluent, realistic animations, and at first MoCap was a tremendous help, but actually nowadays more money and effort goes into that, than old-fashioned hand-made animation in the past (actors, stunt-men). Down to facial expressions, which really are a lot of work. Esp. the post processing is more of a bitch than most people think. I know a few people from that scene, it's an obscene amount of work to get right.

So dev, publisher, likely demand levels, % taken by platform/and engine used, average cost of similar type of game, brand name/ip etc...

Didn't Valve have automated facial expressions that were controlled by voice recognition all the way back when Half Life 2 was released?

As for modern day facial animations it would be a simple case of having a set of generic expressions then an algorithm tailoring it to different characters.