One of the multiple advantages of communicating through MIMO systems is their inherent ability to provide flexible configurations. Following this line of thought, in this paper we present a generic framework to study the degrees of freedom in the design of MIMQ communication systems (e.g.: code length, number of multiplexed streams, or receiver structure). Precisely, we focus our efforts to bridge the gap between the design of MIMO systems with full and no channel state information at the transmitter side and also with different complexiry degrees at ihe receiver side. For instance, we can establish a trade-off, not only between the achievable rates and the diversity or beamforming gains, but also between the rate and the robustness to uncertainties in the channel state information.