That’s a great looking animation!! 
I’ll try to give it some thought, but as it looks now we simply can’t animate individual vertices on the cpu and have that scale in perf in any reasonable way. Right now some ideas are floating around in my head where this would be a checkbox for really heavy-duty things (like the house-monster), where we would at build-time burn out all vertices into a sequence of meshes (flip-book but for meshes rather than textures) and then lerp between meshes on the gpu to use the result as bind-pose. No idea how that would work or perform really, but could be an option. Sometimes absolute brute-force can work quite well, especially if you can do a lot of the calculations at build-time. 
What we really want to avoid is that animators spend a lot of time making all these great animations by moving vertices, and then there is no way to have that run with everything else in the game on the target platform. That makes everyone really sad. 
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