In fact, I have to admit I'm a little skeptical about adding non-sex animations. They can certainly be a good thing in the right circumstances, but I've seen so many games lose their mind trying to animate utterly trivial details to no real effect beyond ballooning the development time (*cough* BaDIK *cough*cough*). You'd think they were trying to make an animated movie rather than a visual novel.
Eh, I tend not to like them either tbh.
For one, with animations that don't loop, it plays against the strengths of the medium. Namely, the precise marriage of text and images. Being able to break up lines and thoughts across different camera angles and other visual punctuation gives you way more narrative control than playing an animation, having it mismatched with player's reading speeds, and necessitating a player wait for it to be done before they can click-to-continue.
There's also the question of execution, because development time aside, they usually don't even look very good. Sex is a relatively simple act, yet animating it to look natural is difficult enough. More complicated, full-body animations is a whole other undertaking and tend to just look unnatural and jarring. Additionally, I can also think of a few examples that have caused me to roll my eyes ("Take it easy, Stanley Kubrick") as the result of unnatural camera dolly/crane-type movements. Like you more or less said, some people forget that they're a visual novel.
Of course, learning new things is half the fun of this job in my opinion, so I'm not going to deride anyone for going out of their comfort zone and attempting something difficult or new, but you can lose sight of the big picture. Keeping things in perspective is one of the most important skills for a lone (or two man) developer in my opinion. Balancing your financial goals against your creative ones, your project's quality vs the time you want to deliver it in, what works for you versus how effective it is for your audience, and keeping in mind why you're doing it in the first place is a lot of balls in the air. In the case of BaDIK, when you're making that kind of money, I suppose things get a lot more freeing if your highest priority is your own sense of quality.
Uh, random tangent aside, trust me when I say it's nothing like you fear in our case. I tried to be exact when I called them flourishes. They're used very sparing and thoughtfully timed to add punch to specific key moments.
However, I would say that myself, wouldn't it?
