If I were going to get into 2d animation I'd pirate Toonboom Harmony or Adobe Animate.

I've used krita to do digital painting, but not animation. It seems to have some rudimentary animation support.

People also use Blender for 2D animation but I think that'd be a steep learning curve, and the tooling also seems kind of threadbare.

I’ve always felt like a tablet monitor would be really helpful for this sort of thing- especially if you wanted to bring your work with you.

I mainly just can’t handle not looking where I’m drawing with my Wacom glorified mousepad tablet.

Blender+Krita are a winning combination. Blender is superior to software with costs in the thousands of dollars, and FOSS to boot. You could go with 3D, 2D, an hybrid of both, generative art etc etc. Steep learning curve? Yeah it's animation, it was never not going to have a steep fucking learning curve. Don't let this stop you from exploring limitless possibilities- I wouldn't say its interface is any more clunky than the alternatives. And it's improving every day.

Can't go wrong with some Youtube Tutorials, trying to reverse engineer some grease pencil files, The Animator's Survival Kit, and some glorious Soviet animation for inspiration.

Also https://www.youtube.com/user/HowardWimshurst https://www.youtube.com/user/AaronBlaiseArt