I definitely feel a lean towards the unusually bad animations camp, even considering the circumstances and BioWare's previous work. It's not universal; some of the animation jank is standard for for not just BioWare but these gigantic open ARPGs in general. Previously cited games like Wild Hunt are guilty of rough animations and assets too, sometimes to the point of hilarity. What strikes me as unusual with Andromeda is the frequency of heavily stilted, robotic facial expressions with some NPCs. In cases like this it's less of a case of intended animation implemented yet lacking polish, and more like certain exchanges are entirely missing expressions, giving a sense of being unfinished.
I'm still hugely convinced something has happened during development that has snagged the team up in animations and cutscenes, and I'm still leaning towards Frostbite 3's tools being kinda shitty compared to BioWare's experience with UE3. It's the little things, from the way FB3's asset pop and streaming limitations, the weird audio mixing, rigid stutter when the camera sometimes changes perspective. BioWare make their games in a very particular way; a vast majority of cutscenes rendered in real time, lots of camera cuts, a fairly large assortment of animation cycles and dynamic choice making, transitioning between playable sequences to dialogue and cutscenes and doing so quite frequently, etc. I can't think of a single Frostbite 3 game that attempts this technical feat outside of BioWare. DICE's projects tend to balance cutscenes between short, linear, heavily scripted real time stuff, and pre-rendered content. And rarely if ever is it interactive. Almost all of Catalyst's storytelling, for example, is pre-rendered.
The actual play animations are almost totally fine to me, though. In motion it feels good to play, and animates fine. I actually think the character movement and navigation is the best looking and animated a BioWare game has been, with a great sense of weight to footsteps and movement with believable feedback with changing terrain and speed. The rigid movement states are gone and it looks so much better. Loving the reload and combat animations too.
And I honestly don't feel any of the animations will be massively fixed in patches. They aren't bugs.
