Guide on adding a new model, animation, and creature to HoMMV

The Nival employees who started working on this around the time of "Orcs" were no longer there, and the new employees did it differently – essentially in one place...

No, the trend of grouping files and ignoring the originally intended structure appeared even in the expansion with the dwarves. It periodically appears in some files of the original game. In "Orcs," it was simply done as a standard practice, for almost everything.

it's clear that they had their own convenient SDK, which they naturally didn't share, but they included some of its functionality in the editor; if you remember, it wasn't there initially... and they had this phrase that the toolkit (read: SDK) they used was too complex for users! But we're supposedly working on a user-friendly map editor that will be convenient and no less functional than in Heroes 3 and 4!

Absolutely. I'm saying the same thing. The structure that was originally conceived is not designed for human processing and convenience. It's a machine structure created by a program. Speaking of the SDK, there's a suspicion that it was simply flawed or unfinished, which is why they didn't share it (or rather, they shared a very cut-down version). Although, who knows what they had.
The Nival guys are great; it's not right to criticize them for the mess in the files. They had a different goal: to create a working game.
Moreover, as I understand it, Ubisoft was constantly interfering with the development with petty, stupid, but time-consuming changes.
I remember a text about Winnie the Pooh from one of Nival's employees. He sadly joked that in Heroes 5, during development,
each hero had their name changed about five times at Ubisoft's behest.

Creating your "dummy" is very cool; by the way, my creations also have a certain standard; I just don't like reinventing the wheel every time! ;)

I'm very glad that you agree with me about the wheel.
I suspected that every modder who added a large number of creatures to the game would eventually think about optimizing performance and create their own equivalent of what I posted above.

I didn't invent anything fundamentally new; I just tried to create a template that is convenient for everyone.

In the future, I think I'll create a similar template, but not for a creature, but for a hero. Will anyone find it useful?

Added 28 minutes ago
P.S. If it's not too much trouble, could someone write something here so that I can then create a separate post with information, the link to which I can put in the header.