Some players prioritized certain things over other things, like the technique of martial arts kicks, and believed other things like the mechanics of warhulks or the physics of radiation blasts were things you were supposed to punt to the devs. But other players felt differently, and the devs squared that circle by not caring about any of it, to any serious degree except where designers voluntarily chose to selectively use it to guide style.
I've been teaching martial arts professionally for 13 years, and I can't say the game's animations ever bothered me for being "unrealistic" for a number of reasons. They were really no worse from that point of view than what you see in movies all the time.
Aside: What actually bugs me about martial arts in media these days is that, for some bizarre reason, it has become fashionable to display it in such a way that you can't actually
see anything that's going on, as if that somehow makes it more impressive. I suspect this is a mixture of just being a cinematographic (is that a word?) fad and the fact that many such actors don't actually have the skills they're trying to portray. However, while I can speak from a fairly knowledgeable place on the martial arts side of things, I don't know enough about film to say much from that perspective.
