I agree with you. The good news is that the software seems to be making it easier to make higher quality animations, because they're much more common in games lately than they were a couple of years ago.
However, I also prefer having just high quality stills and writing if the animations aren't very good. Low quality animations actually make it less sexy, IMO. This is one of the reasons that I enjoy a higher percentage of HS games to Western ones, because there are a ton of great animations that even the most basic developers can use in their games.
And even good animations can be done wrong. Inserting an animation causes a change to the flow of the game. From the player reading and clicking through at his or her own pace, it goes to an animation running at the pace of the developer. Even worse if it's a sequence of animations, and the very worst case scenario, they are unskippable and run at a minimum length as well.
And that's just assuming they are good animations. Animations *are* hard to create. Not hard to render, they mostly take time to render, but creating a good animation by itself really is hard. You could buy animations, but many of the animations I've seen for sale are pretty mediocre, while the good animations are popular, and seen in several games already, meaning they don't bring much new to the table for the game developer to stand out.
Several of the games with better animations aren't one-man projects, they're made by a team, with one of the members practically specializing on creating custom animations, while helping out with other renders on the side. I wouldn't hold it against a one-man team if he/she doesn't do animations, even less custom animations.
Animations also add other considerations which are more important to the overall feel of the game than you might think:
-Should conversations or flavor texts continue during animations?
-Should animations be accompanied by sound effects? Voice acting? Or maybe just background music? And if I use background music, should I sync the animations to the music, or pick music to sync with the animations, or just not care about that and focus on creating an atmosphere instead?
Decisions, decisions, a lot of work, and skyrocketing download sizes, for some 3-30 seconds of a game that mostly revolves around static images.