wow THANK YOU. I was stuck on this for a few days. cheers!
to help future googlers find this:
playing an animation (anim sequence) on a skeletal mesh has get morph target/GetMorphTarget always returning 0. The solution is knowing about anim curves. The curves of the anim instance are getting set. To make matters more complicated they are not setting the morph targets, but the curves are take their names from the morph target names in the skeletal mesh. This is convoluted and unintuitive. Unless there’s something I’m not understanding, setting the morph target manually gives you the same result as setting the curve, so getting the morph target should be the same as getting the curve.