If it works it works.
There probably will be another more efficient method, but I've just woken up & my brain is not at working capacity yet, but I think Lua & controlling the currently displayed animation frame of various animations or of a single animation may be the way to go.
Alternatively, VS now has support for Spine (or is it Spriter - think it's Spine) sprite part animations, which should be scriptable & allow you to easily swap out certain parts of an animation with another, sort of like those pick 'n' mix sweet boxes you can buy at the cinema. I've not gotten round to using that feature yet, so I'm not sure on how it works, but maybe SimonS or BigStans (probably Simon) can explain how it works to you.