I had a hunch that adding a second negative scale dial and having an Over Master driving both with an absolute 0 throttle overtop would correct things. Animated centers are tricky, more tricky than JCMs I've discovered, even more so than multi axis JCMs. The thing is not only are you manipulating the rig via the joint editor but also manipulating a dependency that has values created via offset parms. It's easy to get the steps wrong. That's why I mentioned Antonia not having a memorized state. Return to default would just be a matter of alt clicking values but in Antonia's case the values have to be recorded prior and then entered manually at 0 state. I think the memorized state can only really be set just prior to saving the cr2 because I tried memorizing Antonia before starting the dependency in one test and alt click/restore did nothing. In any case manually entering the values isn't a big deal.

Nerd seems to be under the impression that I didn't know about the return to 0 state, which is kind of funny because I've picked his brain over some pretty complex stuff, when in fact it was the specific offset parms being restored that was throwing me off. Of course there's absolutely no mention of this in the manual. I only figured it out because Nerd offhand mentioned it in the process of explaining something else.