I'm still very much in favour of replacing the WebKit back & forward animation/implementing a new one on top of WebKit.
For anyone who dislikes the WebKit gesture as much as I do, the workaround I have been using is under system settings, within trackpad, then more gestures, change swipe between pages to "Swipe with three fingers". The annoying thing about this workaround is that you have to disable three finger drag under accessibility settings.
I have also found some weird behaviours with the three finger swipe for back and forth, between weird page reloads instead of actually going back or forth, and the fact that it doesn't seem to work on the new tab page.