I have minimal experience with Enchanter Animations other than to agree with you in that they are fine to use for your upward crawl of getting level 20 if you aren't okay with charm breaks and issues of mobs with how they con to you in your teens and so forth. I leveled a dark elf enchanter and even with max starting Cha and good cheap items the breaks were just a part of the mechanics of being in the teens, and sucked.
I focused mostly on undead while leveling and saved rusty halberds both from mobs and from merchants in mage summoned bags that I would corpse between play sessions. The increased damage assisted with leveling in a pretty big way. In terms of giving the animation armor to wear, I never tried it as my character was tanking most of the way through using haste and slow, and mage summoned bandages. It was dumb but it worked to getting 20 and that's all i cared about.
You could experiment with armor on the pet if you really want and just do some damage parse comparisons. I can tell you that giving a full set of banded armor on a mage pet does make a significant difference in the damage they receive through the 40's and even early 50's, but I'd only ever bother if it's a camp of some sort that I wouldn't want to use the Reclaim strategy.
I believe the highest level summon for the 20 animation can dual wield. And then all of the level 24 summons on up can dual wield if given 1h weapons, as per the wiki.
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