With item placement, as Thom said, with svn trunk it drops exactly where you aim, with exactly the same orientation as the player, if it is not too far away from your character.
As for the animations, emotes can be linked to any of the existing animations already, it just needs entering in the server's emotes.xml file. I just tested it, by setting '/bow' to the 'swim' animation, '/charge' to 'fight' and '/drunk' to 'death'

it worked fine the first time, I did it once, and he stayed down until I moved forwards, but then I did it twice without moving, and he would not get up but stayed on the floor... guess he was too drunk by then to do anything but roll.
I guess I found an unofficial bug...