Creating my own character animation controller

So I'm trying to learn more with unity, and I would like to be able to animate my character. On one PC, I downloaded the Penelope tutorial to see how they did animations - and it looks like a mess:

 The Update function is going to contain a lot of conditional checks to determine which animation
 to play. Before we start writing them, we need to get some information about Penelope’s
 horizontal and vertical movement.

Uh, this seems like a disaster waiting to happen - if my character controller already contains this logic (e.g., jumping, etc.) why should I have to duplicate it?

My thought is this. I have my Character Controller, and I create a public variable named "characterState". I could set this variable to "IDLE" or "RUNNING" or whatever, it just needs to store what the character is currently doing. I could then write a seperate Animation Controller that stores a local private copy of this status, and constantly looks to see what the CharacterControllers "characterState" variable is doing. If the local vs. public variable is different, update it locally and play a new animation.

Here's some pseudocode to explain my idea

 CharacterController
 {
       public myCharacterState as ENUM_CHAR_STATE { Idle, Run, Walk }

       Update()
        {

        myCharacterState = IDLE

        if (INPUT = FORWARD)
            myCharacterState = WALK

        }
 }

 AnimationController
 {
       private localCharacterState as ENUM_CHAR_STATE { Idle, Run, Walk }

       Update()
        {
            if (localCharacterState != CharacterController.myCharacterState)
            {

                if (CharacterController.myCharacterState == IDLE)
                    playAnimation(IDLE)

                if (CharacterController.myCharacterState == WALK)
                    playAnimation(WALK)

                if (CharacterController.myCharacterState == RUN)
                {
                   if (localCharacterState == WALK) 
                   {
                       // blend animation
                   } else { 
                      // replace animation
                   }
                }
                
                //etc....


                localCharacterState = CharacterController.myCharacterState
            }
        }

 }

This is just some rough pseudo-code I just threw together to get my point across. However, since Unity is all new to me, what are the disadvantages that I could experience by programming it in this fashion?

EDIT: I just thought of something, what if the player is RUNNING and JUMPING? Or FALLING and HIT WITH A ROCKET? I would argue that the most recently applied animation should be the one that plays on through - the animation shouldn't determine gameplay. And in the case of FALLING and HIT WITH A ROCKET, if getting injured while falling cancels gravity and let's you float in the air, that's just poor programming to begin with ;)