Question Animations driving me nuts

So I tried my hand on making a little game and after 18 days I have a working level.
The little dude had a set of guns, ammo is tracked, there are working door,s elevators, checkpoints, etc..
I think I got pretty far with 0 experience in making games.

But half of the time I spent making it was wasted wrestling with animations. They are driving me nuts. They refuse to work and are giving me a lot of problems:

1. For some reason my animations are angled 45° (despite no angles in blender and despite no rotations of the model)

2. Trying to add new layers for things like melee attacks causes the player and enemies and friendly AI soldiers to be stuck in the melee animation, despite me making sure that the condition for it fireing is EXPLICITLY off. Normally I set a trigger in my animator that is set from my PlayerController. Specifically layers seem to mess things up.
Which is even weirder, since I have my reloading animation set the same, and it works, only activates when I hit R. And I tried setting up a kneeling animation that only activates if grounded and pressing down - stay constantly on.

It's driving me nuts

 

I guess a picture is worth a thousand words.
Here's the game after 10 days of work:

And here is it after 19:

Using a different model with a different animation set and animator (because first was a mixamo rig and I cannot edit the animations root motion)