Only the devs can answer most of your questions about the engine, so you might want to send them an email about it.

As for animation, as far as I know they did it to save on computing power. Unlike most other space strategy titles out there, SoaSE was designed with a very large number of ships in mind. Its not uncommon to see battles involving several hundred ships at one time - having all those ships with animated turrets would probably hog even the most powerful rig.

And I doubt that we'll see animated turrets, certainly not via a mod, and very likely not via a patch since it would probably require a rewrite of a good sized section of the code.