It all depends on whether or not I have access to some kind of fast-forward function (playing on emulators or newer FE games where you can hit a button to skip them). Yes? Animations on. No? Animations off. The “L button to toggle animations” hack is nice and gives flexibility to easily watch an animation for cool/new stuff, but on the other side of that coin there are games that force animations for all boss fights, which I find extremely annoying.
Then there’s the wrinkle of “do units on the map swing their weapons and stuff even with animations off”, à la FE5 and FE9. I actually prefer watching the map units fight each other over transitioning to animation scenes. If GBA had something like that, I would just zero out all the animation pointers and have the fighting map sprites exclusively.
Can we also talk about animation option 1 (no background) versus option 2 (with background) in the GBA games? I see people change it to 2 all the time, but I actually prefer option 1 because it makes the “the battle scene pops out of the map like a diorama” effect even more persistent, with no need for a screen transition at all, and that’s coolradcool.