Attempting to make simple animations for a game character in Maya LT, help is appreciated

MMKH

Hello Polycount 3D experts, I have been working on a personal project for the last few weeks which has been in the works since last fall. I have now moved onto the animation phase of the project, and would like to know how I may be able to animate this easier and more smoothly. I have used Maya LT's built in HumanIK system to set up the initial joints and control rig.

Idle Animation:

Walk Animation (notice the jittery-ness):

In a previous character, it seemed like I had control over each individual control handle (IK) when setting keyframes which made it easier to focus on an individual area to animate first.  However, in this case, whenever I keyframed a previous control handle, it would add keyframes to other areas like the wrist handles, neck, etc. It made it a bit more challenging to work with because when editing a specific control handle's keyframes, it would affect others that I've previously set. For example, when trying to delete excess keyframes of the wrists it would delete the ones I set for the legs.

Basically my process involved first moving and keyframing the ankle and toe control handles of the legs, then rotating and keyframing the hip control handle. It is supposed to be very simple but the end result had some areas looking like they were twitching around (because I had to manually keyframe them in positions that were slightly off from the other to try to compensate). I've also taken a look at the tangents in the Graph Editor and noticed that the curves were not very smooth, even after smoothing the first and last points. I've also tried deleting keyframes in between 1-16, 16-33 for the wrist for example when animating the arms, but it did not change the jankiness of it (looked like there were still keyframes).

Any advice on how to create a better walk cycle? Should I try to clean this one up or start over? Thanks