good, so now we know why “2: My character won’t always face the center of the actor. It moves to it, but stands beside it, or runs around to the other side of it, instead of the side closest.”
so the solution to 2 is to stop the character (with collision on) before he tries to get into the center of the other actor. There are a few different ways to do this… you could use a Move To Actor (with the nav system), you can use Vinterp or a Timeline&Lerp… with different techniques, you have different options of stopping before the collision, or using the collision to turn off the movement (preventing the weird behavior)