HI Shawn,
Sorry if any of this is off the mark – I haven’t read the full thread so I’m a little confused as to what’s going on haha.
But I have flagged it with Kent that I think we need to rig this project when it’s done 😉
You are on the right track (pun not intended) but you can keep everything inside the 1 armature rather than using an armature and 2 empties.
Swap your empties for bones and then parent them in the same way (rather than copy loc constraints). Everything else will be the same – except you will probably need to avoid parenting one control to the other (as you are likely to get a dependency cycle – but I will have to take a closer look at things to be sure, I’m just thinking out loud at the moment). If you do get a dependency cycle you can then unparent and use the copy loc.
Keeping all the controls inside the 1 armature will make it useable for animation 😉
As for the stretching part – I’m not exactly sure how it needs to work but try the stretch to constraint and turn off the volume preservation so it stretches the geo along the length of the bone. (otherwise you will get cartoony S&S)
The stretch to is very similar to the damped track but it also stretches.
