Unfortunately, this is correct, at least in SGDK version 1.x. If you are going to make a large number of maps with similar interactions and animations in each level, then what I would suggest is creating a "template" map and define everything there, then copy it to each map using a script during run-time. If you want to see that in action, you can take a look at the Wudd demo. Or you could define everything in the script without a template map (See Gold Yoink). If all you want to do is copy the animations, a script to simply copy an animation from a given map to a different map would be relatively simple. The only bad thing is that the names of animations have to be unique to the entire project, not just a map.
