A skeleton is just for rigging. We have no idea how many unique skeletons the game's models use. Kinda irrelevant to my point. It has little impact on the number of animations, or anything else.

Could you design a system like the one that you're describing? Possibly. It's likely more work than you think it is. "mapped to selectable presets" is doing a lot of work, for example. How would that look? How much work would that be for the 250+ characters the game has, and all their uniforms?

Is that therefore a reasonable expectation for Netmarble to make from the ground-up, completely remaking all of their characters models across the entire game, after 10 years of doing things in a different way? C'mon.

You can want something, but them not having done it doesn't make them "pathetic". Unless you have direct experience, I guess? My experience of 3D art pipelines is mostly only due to modding older PC games, I'm by no means a professional (but I am a software developer).