Thanks for adding your notes about your experience, Grady.
This is an excellent thing to mention.
You should always check that both the mesh* and the armature have no transformations. ie - 0,0,0 for location and rotation and 1,1,1 for scale.
*Some mesh objects might actually need to have translations on them (like eyeballs). Because it can be way easier to have the origin point actually be the pivot point.
But what you might find helpful for meshes is to lock the transform channels so at least they can't accidentally move. (You can do this for the armature object but then you need to remember to unlock it again so it can be animated. Remembering this locking and unlocking is extra cognitive load you probably don't want to add to an already complicated task - which is why I wouldn't recommend this unless you are constantly moving things accidentally)