So in beta 1.7.3 when only musket's were added it behaved a little differently, it would automaticly reload, and instead of the bow like animations it would just play the attack animation, it would be cool if there was an option to enable this mechanic for each ranged item

Are you sure that it is incredibly big? I am pretty sure it should be exactly as big as usual.
Another option would be to turn off render-entity-model in the configuration.

Also related: #11
It's a nice suggestion, thanks :)

also thrown knife/spear model is hardcoded making it incredibly big if you have like a 16x16 texture, it would be nice if you made it use a model from the assets folder