It either means you're a lousy animator, an awesome animator or a crippled animator.
The first if you don't care about your end product and thus don't need a smooth workflow
The second if you do all the good animation in your head and thus don't need a smooth workflow.
The third if you ACTUALLY would benefit from easy flipping-through frames, not meddling with showing/hiding layers on and off all the time, onion skin, etc, thus DO need a smoother workflow : D
Jus kidding though, you're probably just used to it. But yes, for me it's weird because I feel crippled when I try it; I'm no photoshop junkie in the first place, so everything just feels awkward. Actually having to click my way through frames and trying to keep track of which layer is which frame makes me go more or less mad. But if that's part of your workflow, you're cool : D
But it does seem weird to me!
It's pretty likely that I'm not doing enough sprite work to feel crippled by Photoshop. I don't do sprite stuff very often, and I'm pretty handy with photoshop so I find other 2D software a bit of a nuisance to get around unless I'm committed to it (like Manga Studio, for example)!
I suspect that I could work faster, and sometimes I
do hate some things about imageready. For example, to click through animation frames I actually have an 'action' setup so that my F6 and F7 keys act as 'previous frame' and 'next frame', and that's not perfect because it doesn't select the correct layer for editing. So yeah, I suppose I am crippled in this respect.
That said, there is plenty that I do love about photoshop's animation system. I like that I can move layers around to quickly test new objects (such as quickly create a static hat layer, and nudge it so that it bobs with the head). I also like that it supports anti-aliasing, as this is often important for stuff I do.
It's not like I do pixels every day though, like you guys! ^_^
