You know whats not made a big enough deal of? Reloading a weapon but getting interrupted and needing to start a COMPLETELY NEW ANIMATION! Putting a new mag in but someone hit you or you switched to something else to retaliate then coming back to find out that the empty mag you dropped on the floor some how magically got back into the firearm so you have waste precious seconds on something that makes absolutely no sense. Devs please make it so if a player puts a new mag in a gun and they have to switch and come back to it, it finishes the animation instead of starting a completely new one.

The act of reloading is 1 action, if that action is interrupted then you have to do the action again.
You could split the animation in 3:

1. pulling the magazine out.
2. inserting the new magazine.
3. cocking the weapon.(do these weapon even require this step?)

Every time one step/phase of the animation is complete it would just start from there next time, this could be easily done by just offsetting the animation time.

While it may be more realistic its effect in the actual game-play is small since you're not interrupted that often, and even so it would only save a fraction of a second, plus this being a 3rd person game most players wont even notice such a small animation.

Now the question is... is it really unnecessary or even worth the effort?