I’m glad you touched on this subject. Handling double animation sets surely is an effort, but each of those sets (arms-only 1P and full-body 3P) individually is simpler than one set of full-body 1P anims. Anims made for 3P often don’t yeld cool results when used in full-body 1P, full-body 1P usually needs anims made specifically for this. And there is the optimization aspect too, with 2 separate sets, you can optimize the 1P for close view - high detail but only one instance per machine, and optimize 3P for less detail, but lots of instances per machine.
There are pros and cons with any approach, but I do find full-body 1P much cooler.