The shoes’ fitting script is tricky. Did you select the shoes, then right click and choose “fit shoes to…”? and the feet and figure went from flat to angled pose? Have you tried to reset the figure and shoes pose?
Anyways, your solution with morph target will work if you’re sending figure combined with shoes. And it gives the same result as the animation blueprint, except for my case, shoes and figures are exported separated using modular character workflow.