Unfortunately it is as as bad as you thought.
There is nothing that anyone can do for this projects as everything has been deleted. Even the whole Animations folder is missing, which is strange.
Did you have the backup option set? Is there a file with the .backup extension in the folder?
Out of curiosity, what physical location was you loading/saving the project to? Was it a local drive or a virtual,i.e. usb, dropbox, google drive etc?