Welcome to the forums @Ernst-Jan, glad to have you here. 
I’m equally excited to see Ragdoll used for puppeteering, as mentioned over email just now, this is the upcoming direction for Ragdoll as well. I’ll throw together some ticks and tricks for you in this thread that I think could help, things I’ve been wanting to experiment with myself for the longest time. Likely in the coming week or two.
In a nutshell, I would experiment with:
- Leaving the character in
Pose Space = Local - Putting a
Pin Constrainton the hip, with theConstrainedoption to transfer the animation - Seeing where that takes me
It would result in the simulation inheriting the animation in a realistic way, of figuring out how limbs should bend in order to reach a pose, which also responds better to contact with the environment.
As an alternative to the Pin Constraint, you could set the hip to Pose Space = World and fiddle with the Advanced Pose attributes in the Attribute Editor. There’s an attribute to have the hip match your animation only along individual axes, like X and Z. Letting it fall freely and come to rest on the ground. This could potentially also work on the hands, to have them fit the animation but still respond well to contacts and gravity.
Also have to mention @Jason’s recent excursion into puppetry here. 