I think animating many different characters is inevitably tedious. I don't see how you could do something in Photoshop to tell Spine where the pivots are. It's the same thing with AfterEffects or SmoothMoves or any 3D animation program. You need to go through the setup process at some point.
But Spine Editor is young. I'm sure the setup process will still get friendlier to least for a few more other purposes and paradigms. I'm personally excited for when the hotkeys come in. 🙂 The right hotkeys can make a program blazingly fast and frictionless to use. (by the way, Nate, if you want some requests for hotkeys, I have a million of them. XD)
Regardless, I think that's why it's ideal to use the Skin system as much as possible and really take advantage of it so you can have more variety per animation effort put in.
As for getting the alignment of layers from Photoshop into Spine, I think something close to Nate's suggestion would work. I think it's doable if you knew someone who could put together something like a jsx script for Photoshop. According to the PSD format spec, Photoshop already stores layers with rectangle coordinates— so you could conceivably get layer offsets and sizes, do some simple math, then format them into setup/bone/bindings data in JSON that Spine Editor can import... I think.
The Photoshop>AfterEffects flow is pretty nice though. You can import a Photoshop file and it creates a comp for you with all the alignments intact. Then you set up the pivots and hierarchy for each layer/part and then you can start skeleton-animating.
