Currently right now you have to create a new view just for character talking animations. My suggestion is to add another checkbox to the character editor
|_| No Talking Loop
Then change loop 8 in views to a default of Talking view this way you don't have to use up an entire view for a talking animation. This just seems to make more sense to me than the current setup. If the user doesn't want loop 8 to be the talking animation he/she can just check the No Talking Loop check box, the same way they can for diagonal loops.
This should still work along with the Lip Sync editor (from what I can tell). And if the user still wants to use a seperate view he can by assigning the number like usual.
To extend this (the above is the main suggestion the following is optional but along the same lines) change loop 9 to the idle loop; loop 10 to the Thinking Loop; and Loop 11 is the Blinking Loop.
Doing all this will still give you 4 more loops to do whatever else you would like.
Like I said just a suggestion (but I would like to think it's a good one).
EDIT: I realized today that you actually need 4 loops for each of those, so unless CJ wan'ts to increase the number of loops per view doing a seperate loop for each wouldn't work... but could still be viable for just the talking view... I guess for some reason I just didn't think it all the way through.
Interesting suggestion - it could work for Sierra-style speech, but lucasarts-style speech can have 8 loops (corresponding to the walking directions) so it wouldn't really work there, as you note.