OH, I just thought of something. You can Try going old school and use envelops instead of vertex groups. I use this with curve objects since they don’t have vertex groups. You switch the armature bone display(Under viewport display of the armature tab in properties editor) to envelope so you can see the envelope’s influence area. Then in edit mode you can use the envelope tool(Second option under bone size on the toolbar) or using Shift+alt+ctrl+s. Note: Size of the bones also affects the envelope and you can adjust the size of the head/tail/body by selecting them individually and using alt+s. You can also do this thru the n-panel with head/tail radius and envelope settings. To get the envelopes to work. Select object, shift+select armature, and press ctrl+p->With envelopes. Blender sometimes does this, but most of the time it doesn’t so go to the modifiers tab and on the armature modifier uncheck vertex group and check bone envelopes.
