So... this issue has become weirder.
I've spent the day trying to troubleshoot this issue with no luck. The "Damager" object still does not destroy with it's pinned "CreatureCollision" object.
Now, because "Damager" is a multi-purpose object that can be used for a variety of attacks (projectiles, melee, area of effect, etc) it has a number of behaviors that I simply disable/enable to fit my needs.
For giggles I removed the "Orbit" behavior from "Damager". I wasn't using it yet for any attacks, and I figured MAYBE it was interfering with the Pin behavior because they share Pin features. I dunno, I'm grasping at straws here.
Anyways, this resulted in something I've never seen, the next time the "Damager" object glitched, it remained visible as usual... but disappeared from the debugger and no longer interacts (I.E. damages the player:
As you can see, there are NO instances of "ParentDamager" or its "DamagerFamily". But its right there, and there are no objects that share this sprite. It's not a side of a 3D object either, it is JUST a sprite.
Does anyone have ANY suggestions on what I should be looking at to fix this? Is this just a straight up bug?
EDIT: One last update on this for anyone that ever runs into this as well. I was not able to replicate this in another .capx, so I don't know what bizarre collection of settings/behaviors/actions lead to this, but I can tell you how I "fixed" it.
I think that the issue may have been a scale tween that was set to "Destroy on Complete". Something must have been interfering with it and preventing it from completing (Possibly the "destroy with pinned object?"), but that doesn't explain the above debugger weirdness.
Ultimately I just circumvented this by unchecking the "Destroy on Complete" box in the scale tween, and slapping a timer that is the same duration as the tween, but destroys via an action.
TL;DR, I don't know what caused this but I can tell you how to work around it, if anyone has any more insight or suggestions I'd love to hear them.