I noticed though that, especially when the character will be in mid-air, they’ll quickly distort badly.
I even tried to make the transition as smooth as possible using the copy-paste flipped but that seems to make the issue all the more noticeable.
Examples here:
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I could be wrong, but in the second video, it looks like the character is going from a 180-degree rotation, to a -180-degree rotation. I don’t know enough about animating yet to say what to do to fix it, but it looks like copy-paste flipped might not work well with more extreme rotation. Maybe try rotating the root bone 360 degrees on the middle and last frame of the animation could help. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The first video looks like it could possibly be an IK problem.
I hope you get it sorted out soon. 
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Looks that way to me as well.
This can work, I did that with my own project. It should also be possible to do that directly on the ending keyframe.
When I did the animation section in Grant’s beginner course, I had similar problems to what’s shown in the first video. Basically, it’s usually caused by giving the bone a pose destination and expecting it to take a certain motion path to get there, but its actual motion path is an unexpected result because of joint structure, bone roll, and other suboptimal things within the rig. I’m not even sure there’s any way to eliminate this possibility completely.
I didn’t have the skill yet to make the rig any cleaner (still don’t, ha!), but I got around the issues with finer pose-to-pose animating - corrective keyframes inserted into a large interpolated movement wherever they were necessary. In your case, you may have to adjust the handles in the graph editor so the motion doesn’t slow down at it reaches these corrective keyframes (ie use a more linear interpolation on those points).
Best of luck with it =)
Maybe try rotating the root bone 360 degrees on the middle and last frame of the animation could help
Which axis would you recommend?
Thanks! I’ll work on more simple animations, then come back to this
May need more resources before attempting again
FedPete posted a link to this some time ago - no idea where anymore, but the video is invaluable.
When you get to the part about Straight-Ahead vs. Pose-To-Pose, I think you’ll immediately see what to do with “corrective” keyframes as I called them.
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I believe it should be the y axis, it will be the one you used to rotate your character. but I really haven’t bothered looking at what w does, so it might not be. I’m not sure if you should add or subtract 360 from your animation. the idea is that you want it to always flow in the same direction (You may need to input the rotation into the n-panel or bone tab.).
I just checked, it doesn’t work the way I thought with the default rotation mode, you might have to change it to euler. Or alternatively, you could add a key frame where it has to switch from one side to the other.
I’m going to have to read up on Quaternion before I get back to the animation course.