This might be a retarded question but is there any way to disable an animation without having write-defaults on? Basically I want to mimic the behavior of write-defaults-on without actually having them on. 

Using write defaults off and setting an "empty state" with an idle animation doesn't work; the behavior ends up different from having an animation-less "empty state" with write defaults on. 

Is there any way to get the behavior I'm describing? pic unrelated