So it turns out to be some kinda Blueprint error. I recreated the base BP for all of my characters and the components are initialized and accessible.
So, solution is to just recreate the blueprints… Which is an absolute pain in the ■■■. I have heard of something like this happening before, some kind of BP metadata not updating to match CPP base classes when changed. I wish the team at Epic would address this, the only fix requires hours of busy work resetting hundreds of fields in duplicate blueprints.