I've discovered that there's a difference in the quality of uploaded animations between client version 1.18 and 1.19 (the current official release). See my later posts in this thread:
/52/c8/262663/1.html#post2016696
I just confirmed that it's an upload problem, not a playback problem. That is, animations I uploaded with 1.19 are crap in 1.18 and 1.19, and animations I uploaded with 1.18 are okay (by SL standards) in both versions.
Has anyone else noticed a recent (as of 1.19) problem?