Yeah that's what I figured. I had the same problem when I was working on a Rainbow Six Vegas realism mod. Not only were the animations too exaggerated on some weapons, but some weapons recoiled DOWN or LEFT instead of up and to the right. In a perfect world, the whole recoil action would be managed by the code instead of the animations, so they could be easily adjusted by just changing the values.
Yeah, I think the best quick-fix would be to use realism running speeds, but disable mouse turning during the sprint (maybe your mouse does freelook during sprinting). This way you can't abuse the realism sprint to do unrealistic zigzags and lightning fast turns.
Also, have the game kick you back to walking if you're on stairs or steep inclines.
The AVT was unusable in real life, why do you think they decided not to put it into mass production? The same was true of the M14; the U.S. military actually disabled the fire selector before issuing it to troops, because after manufacturing it, they realized the recoil made the auto feature useless. Standard-size rifles just don't work very well with full-power cartridges in full auto; they're too light to handle it...which is exactly why the assault rifle was born.
Yeah, I don't know what the damage values are in the game, but IRL the 7.92x33 round actually does MORE damage than conventional rifle cartridges due to early yaw, as shown here:
http://i459.photobucket.com/albums/qq319/DocGKR/WWII.jpg