Leomerya! I cracked the case. Or, rather, someone else did: Attack animation not working - Development / Character & Animation - Epic Developer Community Forums (unrealengine.com)
After copious digging I finally found a thread with a solution that worked. The solution was: Ignore the Aurora animation montages and… remake the Aurora animation montages from scratch using the Aurora animation instances. I can’t make sense of it. But it worked…
Now I have the problem of the AI spamming attacks despite my delay nodes. But that is a FAR more common issue than the weird, Paragon-centric stuff
Thanks again for sticking with me on this bizarre journey