(im not op but having the same kind of issue)
you could do that BUT im running into a problem where it only reads some of the animations but not others, as a test run i did a quick bf/gf recolor to mess around and see if i could figure out the new setup but now BF only has his idle and "hey!" animations, and gf only has her cheer and down animations. i've gone through both their JSONs and XMLs and there's nothing that isn't lining up, and the animation editor in the game hasnt actually been that useful ngl
it's not game-crashing bad, and they look completely fine, it's just odd they only have two animations each and there's not really any reason why (that i've found as of yet)