The animations are a holdover from the Alpha Phase battle system. All the attack animations in this game have movement stun properties. A lot of amazing games with great actions have the same property of not being able to move while the animation was busy looking pretty, such as Street Fighter, which is an example of some of the best video game combat around. The difference is the speed and and values of start up, hit and recovery frames.

None of the animations were designed for a system of this pace, and they were definitely not designed from the ground up for this system. They were just shoehorned in. The best thing for them to do is to change the values of the animation frames, since creating totally new animations is a long and expensive process (i know. i'm studying animation).

But the current battle system is going to be thrown away anyways. We can only hope that they build the new system to better use the animation assets they already have, or build new animations from the ground up that wont inhibit the new system.