Cloth Component on character 'collapsing' on play?

UPDATE: So turns out I had some object scaling leftover in the model. Not really sure how that crept in since I'm usually pretty diligent with that stuff and recall applying all scale at one point. But human error is elusive. Anyway, someone can delete this thread, or leave it up for reference. Maybe it'll help someone in the future!



Basically, I've weighted my skirt with the part under the belt to be unmoving. Then I've allowed the rest to be free flowing.



Based on the tutorials I've seen with the 5 system, I'd expect the skirt to hang down and clip through the legs since I don't have any colliders set up.

Instead what happens is this:

You can see when I show the constrained verts they're all bunched up around the waist, and when I enable and disable the component the skirt snaps up into the waist.

I'm sure I'm probably doing something wrong here in the workflow since I couldn't find much solid documentation on that. Basically, I'm weighting my whole character. Then the skirt is a separate object which is also weighted to 4 skirt bones. (I've also tried this with the skirt as the same object; same result). Should the skirt be weighted to the waist bone? Should it be void of weights?

Edit: after fooling some more, it started throwing thousands of these errors just continuing

This happened before when I was trying to work with cloth. The solution was to delete the asset, and the scene, and change the editor layout. I feel like I'm doing something seriously wrong.

Edit2: Perhaps another hint to what's going on. When I add the cloth component to the skirt the skirt suddenly has a very far clipping distance to the scene camera. What I mean is, if I zoom in to the object, the skirt's renderer seems to disable, while the rest of the body mesh (without the component) is unaffected.