Asset Cache not caching @animation files

We're using 3.5.6, asset server, and the asset cache server. The asset cache works very well most of the time. However we recently switched our characters from a giant Blender file with cut-up clips to separate files using the @animation naming convention. This drastically decreases import and iteration times for the animator, which is why we did it. However, they don't seem to be cached. When the rest of the team updates from asset server, we each import the new clips locally (and maybe more than just that because that presumably triggers the main object to be re-imported as well). So now our slowest assets to import, which were 'fixed' by the asset cache, are once again a bottleneck.

I reviewed the asset cache documentation, which talks about the conditions for updating, but they are fairly low-level, and since this seems focused only on these @anim files I was wondering if anyone else has seen this behavior, and if they figured out a way to avoid it.