Alright, so it turned out that the tutorial Link] I followed to make the first platform blueprint also included how to setup custom collisions for objects interacting with the platform, and now I no longer have any issues with the character’s weapon interfering with the platform.
As for the Animation Notify issue, I noticed that the ground-based version of the swing animation was missing a couple of frames at the end, which was rather odd since the jumping/falling variants consisted of 17 frames compared to the ground-based versions’ 15 frames. So I re-imported the animation from Blender which added the missing frames back in and then tried re-positioning the Notify in a variety of different areas along the timeline, but no matter what, the weapon would always disappear too early. Not helping matters is that for some reason if I try to place the Notify on the final frame (#17) it won’t play the Notify at all. I don’t remember being the case before I re-imported the animation so I’m not sure what’s going on.
Since you also mentioned attaching the Notify to another animation, I decided to try & attach the Notify instead to my character’s idle animation since the swinging animation transitions back into the idle animation. however did not go well as it instead it caused the weapon swinging to glitch out.
I’m not really sure what to do now, especially since I don’t really want to re-animate the whole animation again as not only it is a hassle to do but the current speed at which my character swings their weapon is pretty much ideal I feel & so I don’t really want to extend it a whole lot. Function trumps form for me, as I want my character’s close-range attack to be fast & responsive to go along with the quick platforming nature of the game I’m building which is more in the vein of something like Mario, Sonic, Crash or Klonoa, and not something like Dark Souls which favours slower, drawn-out attack animations befitting its own more methodical-style of gameplay.
For the time being though, the most important thing is that attack swing appears to be perfectly functional in its current state, so I should be able to progress onward with the development of my game even if the animation itself isn’t perfect.