thanks, with a small modification that helped a lot.
Animations per scene is not the problem, its that each scene has its own version of graphics and therefore animation.
we have about 13 scenes and probably about 30-40 anims per scene (as well as multiple clips per anim, but that's not an issue).
the modification I made was that our anims are named
Anim_SceneName_AnimName.
so I just split the name on '_' and grouped on the 1st 2 substrings.
I have now written some code so that if the only difference between animations is the sprite collection they come from (different graphics but same file names) then I can remap the animation on level load which will help a bit.
Another issue though, is that if an animation is created by duplicating and modifying an existing one it doesn't get added to tk2d's animation list.