Don’t use a duplicated Skeleton, but rather use a duplicated SkeletalMesh. The SkeletalMesh has a Scale value on it (we added this, stock Unreal doesn’t have it) that you can use to modify the scale of the Mesh. That way you can make your character bigger without having to use the Component scale. This should not affect the scale of any Sockets, which is what’s causing the problem described above.
Never the less, we’ll look into solving the Socket-pickup-scale problem as well – but that’s the current work-around 
Cheers,