So gear shift animations to me add a lot of realism, but I understand that creating such animations may be complicated.

H pattern gearboxes and sequential gearboxes etc are more complicated to make, but just simple animations for paddle shifting would be great.

Yeah, this is a cool suggestion, but it's actually very complicated to implement.

At the moment, for each car (or mod) it has to be defined how the driver's hands are moving along with the wheel at several angles lock to lock, then LFS fills in the rest by linear interpolation. The question is, how to implement the gear actuation? It would require users to make additional animations for each shifter config, for each angle (for each gear for H-shifter, seq or paddle would be simpler)..

As much as I love this game, I’m a simple guy who loves sim racing but I don’t really understand game mechanics so I have no idea how to do this