With your patience, no wonder the little human is just fine. 🙂
Sorry for the late reply, but I finally got around to being able to fiddle with this again and all I can say is:
Thank you thank you THANK YOU!!!
Things get pretty confusing once all these little widget boxes start overlapping, but the way you illustrated that helped me really understand the “how and why” of this process a lot better! It’s still magical, but a bit more predictable now. 😉
I finally have a chest that squishes and squashes as if it were the same object, and I can carry on with animating it. I hope this might help anybody else who runs into the same thing.
Stay awesome, Mr. Dixon!