Is there tool to facilitate SVG animation?

Hand coding SVGs seems to take forever and harms creativity. I've been wondering if there are tools for creating and experimenting with SVG animations. I'd love to incorporate SVG animations in sites. However the thought of writing paragraphs for making a circle doesn't seem like a good use of time.

But I still think SVG has potential. As compared to GIF you can control it much more using programming and make it reactive to events.