Looks to me like they only made one set of hands due to all the frames needed. Remember, memory limits were the reason the alternate enemy variants got cut. The pistol has three sprites and they're all pretty small, so it's a pretty reasonable feat to include six more sprites for the different skin tones. On the other hand, five of the knife's sprites have the hand visible in them, and they're all pretty huge. That's ten more massive sprites when you're trying to conserve filesize, all for an animation you could feasibly go the whole game without seeing. Don't even get me started on God Mode. Seven massive sprites not good enough? How 'bout 21!?

wait did they just forget to make knife sprites for doug LMAO