I am using spritesheets, generated from a bone animation program, “dragon-bones” or some such.
But as my character grows, gains more skills, weapons, moves etc, I am left wondering if there is a faster way… Perhaps like importing animation data directly? It would be nice to control limbs and outfits on the fly, rather than pre-rendering every possible animation.
What is the standard, and do you guys use mere spritesheets for medium to big projects?
You could load an XML containing the animations’ source rectangles and names so that you don’t need to hardcode any of that. I’ve never tried it but I think some people have done that.
No standard. Different projects, different methods 
Sprite sheets are great if you dont need to so-smooth transitions with random positions, and dragonbones/spine/spriter animation skeletal animations are great when doing these.
Im currently creating a little 2d animation software which uses smooth anim (like those above mentioned) but much simpler and fast (it is for mg web ), sprite atlas are used so can change every image at realtime (mostly used mouth images when character speaks).
My company uses esoteric spine for 2d animations. Our graphic artists love it and it has a lot of features. http://esotericsoftware.com/. Animations w/ lots of features, skins, sounds, texture atlases, etc.
There is a spine runtime for monogame/c# available so no additional development.
Thats the kind of answer I was looking for, thank you. Definitely looks cool with the monogame support and all…
I found there are two ways you can deal with Spine in your engine. You can either maintain and pass in the matrices for scaling, rotation, position as you move the item around your screen… OR you can actually just modify properties on the root bone of an object.
You do have be sure and begin and end your normal sprite batches if you plug them into the middle of a 2D game.