WOW!
Nice analysis! It's totally bad animation!

Did Cy Twombly sketch that shit?
Computer animation and video editing are probably the key understandings for the public to understand if they are to grasp the various softwares used to fake the 9/11 media.
For a while I was wondering how they did the smoke speeding up - slowing down - speeding up -
reversing - etc. until we suggested that what they are doing (for some of the videos - mainly the morning broadcasts and their various offspring) is an automatic 'tweening' program.
How that works is it renders a number of necessary frames that exist between two 'key frames' or 'extremes' that are drawn for the computer to fill the rest in. They didn't keep track of the timing so the smoke just dances around in bizarre ways - esp. changing speeds with visible tufts that you can trace moving across the screen.
This looks like straight-up key frame animation with no tweening - or a 3D model given inadequate pixel frame - or a writhing figure on blue screen - anyway shrunk down to tiny size and well, ending up just like "bad drawing[s]" as you so perfectly suggested.