Hey malevolent,
I’m having a bit of trouble following your setup. Would you mind providing a list of repro steps I could follow to get the issue to occur on my end?
What I tried was creating an actor that spawned an AI character (AICharacter) and then in AICharacter I set the skeletal mesh and animation blueprints to something, and restarted the editor.
After the restart, the skeletal mesh and animation bp were not reset as you are experiencing.