hitbox/hurtbox timing in frame-data driven combat — how are you wiring this up without it becoming a mess?

Building a melee combat system and the part giving me the most grief isn't the feel or the animation, it's the data pipeline for hitbox activation windows. I know what I want: on frame 8 of the swing, activate hurtbox A, deactivate on frame 14. Simple in concept. Nightmare in practice.

I started with hardcoded offsets in animation event callbacks, Unity's AnimationEvent at specific normalized time thresholds. This works until you tweak the animation timing and suddenly everything's shifted. Or until you want to adjust the active window by "just a couple frames" and realize you need to re-time events in the clip by hand, every time, forever.

I've since moved toward storing frame data externally. Each attack has an entry in a ScriptableObject with startup, active, and recovery frame counts, and hurtbox definitions are separate assets activated by the state machine based on those values. Decoupled from the clip itself. But now I'm fighting a different problem: the state machine needs to know the current animation frame to index into that data, and frame-accurate queries against the Animator are surprisingly annoying to get right, especially once you account for playback speed modifiers.

Things I'm still wrestling with:

• Are you driving hitbox windows from animation events or from external frame data?
• If external, how are you keeping the data in sync when an animator retimes an attack animation?
• Has anyone built even a basic visual frame data editor? The spreadsheet workflow is genuinely killing me.

Also curious if anyone has tackled the hitstop problem. When you freeze the animation on hit, do you pause the hitbox window timer too, or does that break your combo linking? That one's been a headache. Every solution I try creates a new edge case.