In previous ball animations, I looked at the ball like its "head" is on its top. with the new squirrely ball with a tail, the head is obviously on the front.
When I look at the squash and stretch of this one because the squash and stretch have the same volume and are about 45 degrees of each other it looks to me more like swimming than jumping.
I would've thought that the squash should have the direction of the jump for being more squashy (90 degrees of the stretch). but that would probably require two squash frames and would be less appealing.
I'm looking at squirrel references and can't find a good solution, maybe you can add the tailed ball model and rig to the downloads section? I want to play with it to see if I'm missing something
Thanks!

Roughly how long did each "stage" (splining, polishing, etc) take you for the example animation you shared with us? How long would you expect a professional to typically take with an animation of similar length/complexity?