Struggling with animation

It's been a while since the last entry. I haven't had any point since then where I have felt the game had changed enough to warrant another entry, but it's finally reached the point where I think you all deserve an explanation.

As I mentioned in the last entry, I've been working on animation-based combat. I expected this to take a while because of the complications I've had with animation in the past. However, I still haven't really sorted anything out.

As far as I can tell, the system I put in place to allow for combos works well, but the animations for attacks aren't playing at all.

Initially when I imported the animations, they were entirely broken and bits of the character were writhing around several feet from the rest of him. I have more recently discovered that I imported them wrong the first time, but the character reverts to his base pose instead of attacking every time the attack button is pressed. I don't forsee being able to fix this any time soon, so I'm considering moving on to another mechanic until I can understand how I might address it. Looking into a Sea of Thieves like sailing system possibility.