No no no. Leave what we already have. Every single player game that changed the animations just made it harder to tell which direction someone was swinging and which direction I had to block. Those 1h/2h animations are fucking terrible. There should never be changes to the melee swinging animations.
I don't mind the idea to add crouching to the game, would be pretty good in fact. There's nothing wrong with the throwing animations, being able to hold your shield up while throwing would make perfect sense, but it would be too OP right now. The game is not balanced around that. In reality, almost all weapons should be able to be swung while your shield is up, but that's not the case in Warband or cRPG so it would be better to leave what we already have.
So I think the only decent suggest would be to add crouching. Don't fuck with the animations we've all gotten used to over the last few years of Warband (that's my biggest pet peeve with a lot of single player mods, they try to make new animations, they end up looking like shit, and make it much harder to decipher which direction you need to block)