The animations is an accessibility issue. Trimble has started working more on accessibility for version 2017 by allowing people to change the axes color and I’d be very happy if someone looked into these animations too.
Does anyone see any downside by having the animations paused until the user moves the cursor onto the instructor? Maybe a play/paus button is better? The animations can be very helpful to give a fast hint of what the tool does but many users simply can’t have it flickering in their views. This means these users can’t have the instructor open while working in SketchUp.
Technically it is quite easy to implement. A script can be made that extract the first grame of the GIF as a separate image file and save it by a file name similar to that of the old file. Then a few lines of javascript can detect the mouse entering/leaving the instructor and change the src attribute of the img element accordingly.