I think there's a misunderstanding here as to our point. Of course games NEED sprites to be able to change DIRECTIONS.
The thing is Dustin and I are confused as to why changing animation direction has to be linked to rotating the sprite itself.
Look at MMF2, you have animations and animation directions. These are SEPERATE from the "set angle" action in the program. This is very useful and I really think setting the angle and the physical animation direction images shouldn't be linked as it is limiting and makes you create many more animations than you should need just to STOP Construct to change to my image of my character looking down instead of right because I wanted a rotating effect without changing the actual image of the character.
<img src="http://www.konjak.org/angle.png">
In this example image I show what I'd like to be possible. Animation direction is a seperate thing, and then setting the angle is another, shown here where the images of the animation directions have both been rotated 45 degrees clockwise (in an ugly way), but the angling is leaving the images alone, not try to flip them once they reach 180 degrees.