Personally I'd focus on moving the story forward. Animation with your rig is just going to make you feel frustrated and ineffectual. Nothing is worse than waiting for hours to get a result you don't like and unlike stills it's much harder to fix animated scenes in post.
Viewing post in Devlog 3: Experimenting with... comments
I agree. And you're right, the animated sprites is definitely very low priority right now, I come to it from time to time and spend a small time testing it out, then I go right back into working on the rest of the VN. I did find myself spending an entire day on it at one point and felt very unproductive. So now, I've learned that and am very careful not to put too much into them. They're kinda in the back-burner for now since I'm way behind on my schedule for the actual VN.