As outlined in the walk cycle thread: having an animation editor for the artists would surely ease your work. I've started to compile a list of notes what functionality would be useful to have for such an editor. We might actually need two tools for the purpose:
1. Rendering scripts for the supported 3d modeling packages
2. The animation editor itself
Right now the article is not really consistent but I wanted to get early feedback on the topic, so there you go:
http://wiki.parpg.net/Tool:Animation_EditorFeedback appreciated. Especially by Sirren as he had to do a bunch of XML file editing by hand AFAIR.