I thought i'd post this here and see if anyone else shows interest.
One thing i'd like to see more of is more diverse animations in terms of time. Most ranged and melee animations are about the same length, contacts between .4 and maybe 2 seconds.
As far as making hero files, that can be a little limiting. For instance you may want a martial artist with a jab-haymaker combo, a quick stunning jab, followed by a powerful, slow windup haymaker type attack. There arent many animations that give you this, most animations assume you are actively in melee, so they are fast. But you can use knockback, stun, density or whatever to slow down your opponent and get a really slow, but risky, high powered "finisher".
Other examples are casters casting spells, a sniper with a long aiming animation, a martial artist perfroming several kata/forms, before unleasing a Chi technique (think last airbender), martial artist with atemi touches, the list goes on.
I'm not sure how many people still create hero files, but having more variety in long animations allows you to still create conservative, low cost characters, whose big attacks cant be used all the time.
I'm still in the process of creating my hero files (I can't tell you how many times I've started over :P).
One of my favorite hero files was Batman, using Gren's latest mesh (it has awesome animations). The combo animations have a lot of variety to them, and they gave me the sense of Batman being an absolute monster in melee. I made the standard 3-hit combo his "normal" move, instead of one punch, and it made him very tough to take down in melee.
Check out the champions site (http://ffcenter.net/champions/). Gren has many meshes with excellent animations that I believe will suit your taste.
Thanks for the reply. I have most of Gren's stuff, agreed awesome anims.
The purpose of the post wasn't that we generally need more animations, but to add or modify existing anims with SLOW timings, to reduce character cost and offer some variety to attack choices. Is there a specific anim on Batman you use that is slow and cheap, kinda for a haymaker attack? What I see are traditional timings, with Defuse of course being long (21 seconds)
I know it was a long post....