Update: I think i'm making some sort of progress in understanding the problem. I didn't have 0 node selected when trying to apply the edit, doing that seemed to make the mesh move upwards in the display and zeroed the scale again as expected, which probably meant I did something. I also found something suggesting using the spells to update all tangent spaces and remove bogus nodes. These both probably did something as I received a notification that bogus nodes were removed, but any changes still were not visible in game. Perhaps the problem is I'm using Nifskope 2 version pre alpha 6, which might not have the required functionality, but all other available downloads were pre release versions too, except for 1.1.3 which wouldnt open the file. Still at a loss but maybe I'm learning something?