I mean if animated java should give more points are imo your choice, but what I can add on is how AJ works.
It's a plugin for Blockbench and it's basicly is a lot like the bedrock format, adding an animation tab. Here you can alter the position, rotation and the scale of elements, but also specify that you want to run commands, place particles, or just mark the timestamp so that when making the datapack aspect you can easily add stuff in manually.
As a reference for how long things take to make, for the seamonster boss I am making I have spent around 1,5 hours modeling, 2,25 hours texturing and 3,5 hours animating it.
