Happy to dive into more details!
For the setup I was describing, you will need two rigs, an animation rig and a post process rig.
The animation rig would be a rig that uses controls to drive bone transforms and you only use the rig to create animation sequences. Once you bake things down to an animation sequence, the animation rig is no longer needed so you don’t want to put deformers in this rig.
The post process rig would be a rig that lives in the PostProcessAnimBp (so it always runs on the character) and uses the bone transforms to drive deformer variables.
One implication of this setup is that you might need to add additional unweighted bones to your character to be used to drive deformers.
Hope this helps!
/Jack