Unfortunately, I also think actually writing animations kind of sucks. For simple things, it works, sure. But for more complex animations, it doesn't seem intuitive to me. I feel like it wants to be programming, but it isn't.
All right, so I've been working on a project to fix that for me. The project is called RCSS, meaning Ruby + CSS. As this isn't exactly my region of expertise, I'd love to hear some thoughts about the direction to take this.
The idea is that we can use a real programming language (I chose Ruby) to generate CSS animations for us. The syntax is sort of neat; I was heavily inspired by the animation functions provided by UIView in UIKit. The project is at an early stage (I've been thinking about it for months, but executed in the last two weeks), so it is easy to move it in different directions, depending on what would be most useful. Though as I view this as an experiment, so maybe it's not useful at all, I'd love to know what you think!
You can see an example of the kind of code you write using RCSS here: https://gist.github.com/2914616
The project is hosted here: https://github.com/jparishy/rcss if you'd like to follow along.
Thoughts and comments are appreciated/encouraged!
Thanks for reading.