Animation is not a premium, and we'll have to disagree that by adding this it would change the place that Ac3D sits in.
It is a basic feature that is sorely lacking IMHO. How many people have wanted to animate their Ac3D models in the environment? ... even in a simple way?
Worst still how many people have looked at Ac3D and moved on because it is just a modeller? Not my place to say this must be done, but just another opinion of a customer.
In my case I found Ac3D in 2002 at version 3. At that time it was a relief to find something that approach to modelling was something that I found familiar and friendly. I still love it today, but fear I may be out growing it because I want to do a little more than just modelling. It seems like just mentioning animation is a dirty word around here?
I had a long think about whether it was worth upgrading to v6, which I did in the end. Mostly because I wanted to continue to support the author in some small way as there weren't many new features which I was excited about. Not that the new features weren't an improvement, but not a great deal of things that that v5 didn't allow me to do already.
This release with the much improved boolean operations, is justifcation alone and something I do want to use.
I'm wondering however, what V7 might have to tempt me..? More modelling tools? I don't know, maybe. Improvements to existing features? Great. Allow me to bring my creations to life, definately. We all look for different things I guess, I'll keep my fingers crossed we'll see some form of animation keyframing one day.