That's a given, but after watching Rueben Kee's (god bless his soul though he left us too early) work on Dragon Claw, I realized that it was more simple in converting it than I had originally thought. Don't get me wrong, still hard work, and lots of editing and frames, but it has the potential to cut out a good portion of the labor in the process of creating the sprites.
After he had created his 3D model and animated it, he lowered the colors for a 2D sprite, and the animation was very smooth. This is what I'm going to try out, to see if it's feasible with an action figure. Thinking back, I wonder why i didn't think of this earlier. I actually considered what you mentioned, me up against a wall doing poses, and later drawing over them to get some animations down as a Guyver set up. Than I realized, I'm a lousy artist, hardly practice, and i'm much better at graphics editing on a computer.