Question Need help with droid animations

Hi to all the great people of the forum
I'm developing a mobile shooter which involves mechanical characters. The problem I'm facing is these characters don't have a conventional walk cycle animation as they don't walk on the ground but rather float in the air using thrusters and control their rotation using rudder as a real droid would do.
But the problem I'm facing is i can't find a way to make the animations work with it.
Like if the user is sliding the movement joystick to the left then thrusters should start moving to right and and thus pushing the droid towards the left. For that i made 2 animations one which starts the movement of thrusters from center position to right and another for moving the thruster from right to center (for when user release the joystick) but the problem is that when the player quickly slide the joystick to left the animation starts playing from the beginning and if the user release joystick before the animation completes then the right to center animation plays from first frame which abruptly make the thruster jump to extreme right and then start moving towards center and vice versa. One possible solution is to bind the joystick axis directly to thruster bone transform and rotate the bone accordingly in real time. But in my game all the characters have unique design and thrusters are located at different angles and quantities so it would be really cumbersome to customize joystick bindings to bone transforms for each character individually.
I've looked for many tutorials online but none solves this problem
Any guidance or tip would be really appreciated.
Thanks!