Here’s where I was using the boolean. The game uses encounters for combat, so they never need to smoothly transition from one idle to another. When they’re in battle, they just need to use the combat idle.
See, I thought the issue might be that using the animations directly wouldn’t accept the Blend Logic here in the transition within the state machine.
But, the blend logic in the transition TO Moving works perfectly. Even if they suddenly go to full speed, the animation is still gradually blended from its current to running. Just not the other way around. So the Blend Logic works one direction, but identical settings on the other transition don’t blend the animation.
Now, what you suggested is a perfectly functional work-around to use the velocity to blend the animations. I get that perfectly. I just figured that since the transition blends work one direction, it should work the other way. 