The second paragraph mentions a couple of reasons: > ...we created a model that potentially has many applications, from assisting the creative process of an ar

The second paragraph mentions a couple of reasons: > ...we created a model that potentially has many applications, from assisting the creative process of an artist, to helping teach students how to draw. For vector output, there's also a subtle but important distinction between machine-drawn images (based on rasterized data) converted to vectors, and generating machine-drawn vector images. The latter could be more useful in (as you mention) animation, as well as producing vector images with clearly isolated elements - e.g., a vector image wherein occluded elements are represented with full masked shapes (preserving editable layers) rather than a single "flattened" vectorized layer.