Good to hear from you, and good to hear that we can move forward on this in a positive way.
What your working on sounds really cool, looking forward to hearing what comes out!
BB's next version has an animation importer as shown here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PcWOpC75yGg
It was a lot of work to get it going and I'm more than happy to share my knowledge and code snippets on how I did it if it helps you at all with your editor. Though you likely already have a process of something like this and mine is very BK/BT specific.
I am going to be releasing what I did of WW on github or the like soon (soon being a very relative term) once I can clean it up because its a mess, if it's of use when I release that feel free to take what you need from it. I think WW could then become a project that anyone can work on and your ideas certainly sound fantastic.
I am fully aware that you are not clueless and would surpass my level of expertise. Having someone like yourself looking at WW or taking WW into a project that could be used as a base for other projects sounds awesome.
The reason I suggest WW over BB is that I really want to do more with WW and this gives me a reason to bring the BB stuff into WW and do some clean up along the way.
BTW here is the Help->About for BB's next release:
https://banjosbackpack.com/bb2/about.png
If you have a website or a link you want there let me know or shoot me a pm and I can add that in.