Ok so it seems that there are two different issues, with one being fixed for the moment.
The camera container not animating was due to the fact that I had set its render to be Hidden In Game. I can see the rationale behind not animating something invisible, however I really miss that there is not an explicit setting or even warning that this is the case - as there is in Unity. So I’m settling this by making the ugly debug mesh visible and I’ll work around that.
For the other case, my character not visible, I still have no clue as of the source of the problem. It used to work, it works in Matinee and in Matinee Movie rendering, so that’s enough for me for now. But I’m very disappointed that nothing has surfaced about that.