If you play a game like Street Fighter 2 you'll note that the animations for many of the basic attacks are extremely brief, something like 11 frames in duration. This may further be reduced by animation cancelling, which allows a new animation to override the currently playing one, speeding things up.
I'm generally skeptical of the ability to speed up the frame rate in order to smooth things out anyway. Players tend to use certain key frames as cues to help them properly time their attacks. By running at a higher frame rate, you reduce the temporal distinctiveness of these key frames. At any rate, I'd like to see and judge the result for myself.
but maybe in the future we'll have fully NN autoencoded games!
In many games the user wants to see close to immediate response to their input, e.g. moving the stick to turn or pressing a button to jump but that inherently conflicts with the desire to smoothly transition between animations.
In reality, your brain starts planning an upcoming turn or jump and moving your body accordingly some time before reaching the physical obstacle you are avoiding. Control schemes for games generally don't allow for this kind of anticipatory input but rather you press the jump button at the moment you want to jump. This leaves no time to smoothly blend the animation - by the time the game receives the input it should already have started the blend some time ago.
I spent ages tuning the code that determined how high to place the dog's centroid above the ground. I gained a lot of respect for the amount of geometry calculations a real dog has to do in order to keep its face out of the floor when running. The code needed to start reacting to a probable landscape collision hundreds of milliseconds before it happened in order to prevent the need for unnaturally large forces.
Obviously the thing to do is to predict user input. Capacitive sensors within buttons to try to detect when your finger is above or resting on a key? Or just hall effect analog buttons, so you can tell when the button starts to go down before it reaches the bottom of the depress action.