Thought I would chime in to state a few things.
First of all, ragdolls can be put at rest until a force acts on them, making them use almost no processing power. Second is that ragdolls can be very realistic, and can look extremely authentic. I recommend looking at the deaths in Red Orchestra 2 for an example of realistic ragdolls. Third is this myth that ragdolls cannot be serverside- with a few optimizations (stopping computation when at rest, only keeping track of a base limb, and placing the same restrictions on them you'd place on other serverside bodies) it is perfectly possible for a decent server to keep track of hundreds of ragdolls. Garry's Mod has shown that a well-optimized engine can have serverside physics on literally thousands of active objects with no trouble.
