Yeah, while cutting down on the length of uncontrollable animations was effort well spent, the elimination of realistic interaction animations was misguided. We'll still need them to drive physical simulation systems if we ever get them.
So y'all got dunked on. Don't be late on defense next time. Or play on sim. The problem wasn't the animations, it was how often they triggered, how repetitive they were, and how overpowered they made dunking in traffic online each and every year.
Unfortunately 2K spent a year working on a dynamic contact shot system that only works for terrible shot attempts but doesn't work on dunks or drives with any real speed. But hey! No dunk ons! Only dunk throughs... ALL THE TIME.
Becareful what you ask for.
So to iterate what I think gamers want even if they don't know it and throw around verbiage like "no more animations!" without knowing what it means:
1. Responsive, realistic, visually and physically accurate simulations >
2. Responsive, visually accurate animations >
3. Unresponsive, lengthy but visually accurate animations >
4. Responsive but ugly, unrealistic physical simulations (IMO. Some would put this above 3.) >
5. Unresponsive, lengthy non-animations that both look bad and with allloss of control.
2K13 Sliding dunk-throughs are 5. It fixes no problems but just makes existing ones look even more terrible. It's like that evil genie that twists every request into the ironic abomination you never asked for.
And I know there are those that want jerky, "responsive" gameplay no matter how bad it looks. They can go play NBA Jam.