Now, I kinda need the animations to work before I can continue working on this thing. It seems as though the control rig is somehow over-writing the animation montages.
The first image with the montage slot second has the montage playing, but the control rig doesn’t do anything. The second image with the control rig second has the rig working perfectly but the montage doesn’t play.
It depends what Control Rig is doing.
If you’re using the Aim constraint or aim node using directly the joint, is perfectly normal that the animation on that joint doesn’t play, because is being overridden by Control Rig.
What you want to do is to have a proxy, like a control, that you’ll use for your look at, then you need to multiply the look at target quat by the rotation of joint you want the look at to affect.
By doing so you’re keeping the animation data from the montage, but also adding the look at behaviour.