Thanks again for your response.
Unfortunately I have already tried all of the above. The armature has a single root bone and changing the simplification made no difference.
I’m still really confused about this whole thing, but in the meantime i gave up and started rigging it again from scratch with different techniques. We have a game to make and this absolute nuisance of a model has impacted my productivity more than enough XD.
If anyone ever manages to figure out what the issue is, please, do reply, because i really want to know at this point. For a bit more insight, i used spline IKs to animate the arrows, but i’m 100% positives those aren’t the issue, since i’ve used them before for the tail of a character and it all went smooth as butter.