After burying myself in UTFEdit for a couple of weeks and then some more, trying to get firing animations to work properly, it turned out all those people who were telling me getting animations working is not worth the bother were not being lazy, and in fact, were just being reasonable and sane. After all, there's a reason animations were cut from the original game, and the leftover code in the engine makes it so even when they do work they're too inconsistent to look any decent (not entirely sure, but it does looks like it's based on framerate, so if there's any FPS fluctuation happening, it makes it so the animation may or may not trigger or play out properly, which happens a lot when all those flashy cap projectiles are flying around the place).
So yea... Unfortunately, firing animations isn't happening. Gonna drop a texture on it and submit as-is.