Yeah character walking (and honestly any animation) is still a real pain. I've seen some people try to use video models almost like a rotoscoping tool but it always looks kind of sus honestly.

Maintaining consistency across a set of loopable frames still takes a fair amount of manual work. Here's an example I put together using controlnet and openpose.

https://mordenstar.com/other/hobbes-animation

That example actually looks really good!