DH and I buy whole chickens and process them. We use a few tools to get the job done.
We use a pair of heavy-duty kitchen scissors (the kind which separates for easy cleaning) to crack most of the smaller bones and snip the meat from joints and such. It is very versatile.
For the larger bones, we mostly massage to pop the bones from sockets and slice around the bone with a paring knife to separate the meat from it.
We leave thighs and wings bone-in, because we mostly cook those whole within a dish and then pull the cooked meat off easily.
We never use good knives to cut through bone. We avoid cutting/cracking bone unless necessary and for those cases we use the scissors (we sharpen those by cutting aluminum foil).
My uncle is a butcher and this is how he taught me to process poultry.
We are also knife fanatics because we cook all the time. We have 2 really nice chef's knives, one Wustof and one custom-made by my FIL. We also have 3 paring knives, 2 wustof and another FIL knife. Then a bread knife and a sharpening steel. Sharp, quality knives are amazing, and much safer to use.