Has anyone thought about using a combination of Staff and sword animations for spear animations? You would have to make small modifications to some of the animations, but at least with staff animations you could thrust with a spear (like it's used for).

The problem with spear animations is not the animating itself, it's the integration into the game through the Behavior HKX files.

Does the recently-released Behaviour File Updater (http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/mods/21397) help with this?

No, unless someone tries to implement spears via scripting, which would be inelegant. That tool seems to only allow the addition of new idle anims that can be called with actor.playidle().

Someone please get this done, if you can, possibly. I have loads of poopy spears waiting to be used and've been putting them off solely for true animation.

Gonna stink when Beth releases their own sometime down the road just after modder's have been doing workarounds just to have them.