the The work hasn't stopped entirely. The patches in the ticket have indeed been decided to be too limited (not that we didn't agree on that though), so I have written a patch (with dps system) that allows N attack-types. But since that patch is too big to drag through the review process at once, so currently a small part is up for review: https://code.wildfiregames.com/D757.
In current svn one can indeed set multiple attack (max 4 in total: slaughter, capture, melee, ranged) types in the template. And actually you already can set different animations in the unit actor.