The Honor Guard lines are not possible to add back in I'm afraid, there is no speech container making use of them.
A generic unit ready code doesn't exist for both Soviets and Wehrmacht. A dirty workaround is to use sound actions, problem with them is announcer speech overlapping and I'm not sure if other players can hear them as well. Didn't test thoroughly enough.
CoH 1 felt more refined in the animation department. German SMGs actually had proper magazine movement while reloading and facial animations were a thing.
For example: Those SMG animations Relic added with The British Forces are horrendous. They are completely broken on sprinting units in combat.
Would a simple fix be reverting all reload changes to the calliope and setting reload time duration to 0 fix the problem? (I don't have the files handy at the moment; is this what you're proposing?)
Setting the reload time to exactly 0 doesn't work, a small "dummy" reload must exist. Using the default reload frequency of 9 might or might not work due to the cooldown changes. A reload frequency of 6 (the issue appears to start after firing 6 rockets in the balance mod) together with a 0.0001 reload should resolve that issue.
-British Tank Commander description fixed and added stats in extra text
-Changed a few strings that required updating due to changed values
-Added recent skin strings
To solve this issue: Set the reload value to 0.01 (or lower, didn't test though) and change the reload frequency to after how many rockets this issue appears. The amount seems to depend on the cooldown between each rocket.