When I make my own graphics, I generally use a 3d design software package to do so, and say I've just made a walk animation for a guy and I want it for 64 directions, what I usually do is set the walk cycle to repeat 64 times and each time I rotate him however many degrees are needed for the next direction. So I have ALL directions of him walking in the one animation file/image sequence.
The only problem I've always had with this was I had to import them all into one direction in the animation editor, then manually go through and cut and paste them in the correct directions (in construct at the moment I have to do it frame by frame!).
One thing that I've always wanted to be able to do, is when importing animations, have the option of something like an "Animation contains all directions?" checkbox, then I could write in the starting direction, how many directions there are (4, 8, 16, 32, 64 etc), and how many frames of the animation there are in one direction.
Also another handy option would be whether or not you want the image to crop each frame's 'empty space' down to the minimum used image area if you get what i mean, tgf and mmf used to do it.
Anyway, I realise it's all probably not a huge priority or something, it would just make animating lots of things go generally smoother (at least for me haha)
Although I will add, I really like the tileset option with the current import image thing, cheers ash