Hey loudo, as far as animation naming is concerned, I personally append a suffix to animation names (_L, _R, etc.) and set the animation playing to animName & characterDirection.
I tend to avoid using entities as well, but mostly as I haven't had the opportunity to make a good use of those. Multiple entities seem to be useful mainly to have different rigs in a single spriter file (but I may miss something here). Anyway, changing entities on the fly requires an added step in your code, every time you want to change animation. Just for code clarity and simplicity's sake, I'd avoid it.
Anyway, once there is a way to sort the animations within spriter and move them around, this shouldn't be too much of a concern.