I thought the game was fine and didn't mind animations so long as I'm able to cleanly skip through them because not being able to cleanly go through the content I've already seen in a game makes the game kind of punish you with a slog to get back to the game. Dev can do whatever and I wish them the best of luck, but as others have said before there is a trap people fall into where they can end up spending so much time overhauling the basic game system or overly "tweaking" existing content so much that the game's forward development dies dead in the water.
Hope it works out! Really enjoyed the last time I played it and I've been hoping to see it pop back up for a while.
EDIT: Wow, I just opened it up and these are not simple animations. It seems clear the Dev made a change to better fit their passions. This is melting my cutting edge laptop and not a big appeal to me, but very impressive and full assed.