A lot to look at!
I'll look in chronological order...
Firstly, in my opinion, yes please! More animators are definitely needed. For the style elements, it's certainly true that the Fallout animations are heavily stylised (especially the "run" one), but I would consider any animation to be better than none at all, especially if they can be produced simply and quickly - and as Horatio said, these can be adjusted later.
It's notable for example that the Van Buren ones "breathed" or "swayed" a little, compared to the completely static poses of the Fallout ones. However, the process of applying this simplicity and style to an existing animation is likely much easier than creating these from scratch. I'd assume these animations are keyframed throughout, but we can likely adapt these stylistically by importing the standard idle pose as the start and finish point, then picking 3 or 4 keyframes from the animation and deleting all other keyframes and letting it tween between those points, making it far less fluid and realistic. Once down to a smaller number of keyframes, they can be tweaked into a more Fallout-like exaggerated position (see the punch or run animations for good examples of exaggerated action).
The currently possible "animation slots" are in
\Client\data\art\critters\_FOHuman.fo3d - you can run additional animations with a debug code, but otherwise they do need linking up in the main scripts. This is entirely possible, but I don't know how to do it personally. It should be fairly easy to understand for anyone with the slightest bit of scripting experience. It was previously suggested that we should add a lot of "flavour animations" for drinking, smoking, using things etc - predominantly replacements for the "milking an invisible cow"
use animation - specifically those for doctor/first aid/failed steal (successful steal probably being invisible).
Regarding project coordination, I'd probably consider Karpov/Graf/Grey as the main coordinators of the 3D stuff, though the 2238 Devs themselves would be responsible for what was to be used in 2238 - though I do have a reasonable involvement in the 3D stuff I think. In the absence of a reply from any of those, I would personally say "yes, go for it". I can't see any reason why this work would cause any problem, and am fairly confident that they would also see the benefits of this - as mentioned before, things can be tweaked and refined in future.
Technically, Karpov's animation was based on a Max biped - I think I may have a source file for this if it's useful to you. Otherwise, the current skeleton is mapped out in one of the 3D tutorials, if you want to look at bone names etc. As said, it's mittens for hands and a single head bone, which I think is perfectly sufficient when you consider the in-game size of the models. For file formats, I've personally used .x through Fragmotion (it can import the native .x files seamlessly) - but pick whatever seems most cross-compatible - especially with Blender, as we've got a few good animators using this. The model orientation is flipped L-R when editing, but is then flipped or rotated in the game engine it seems - whatever you export must match this. The model may appear "face down" in some programs, due to the difference in Y/Z axis for up that some formats or programs use. Any "no_name" bones which appear can be safely deleted. You should have everything linked to the main skeleton, and an additional two hand bones, again there's a diagram in the tutorial section which should help.
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Looking through the little videos you've put up, it's all looking good. The bits that would need tweaking for "Falloutness" are likely the movement of hips, rotation of torso etc. If these animations had existed in the Fallout world, they'd likely have a completely static body, with just the movement of the arms. I'm pretty confident that it's doable, simply by positioning the body to the normal "idle pose", then using some of the keyframes from the arm movements, but deleting all the lower body movements. I'm almost certain I could do this with Fragmotion myself, but I'm a little short of time right now. I'll try and have a go at a couple quite soon, and see if it's as easy as I think it will be
