This reminded me of back in the late 90s when I worked on a world simulation project. The animation system worked by animating individual objects, there was no way to attach them to each other to guarantee that they stayed together. So a car and an avatar riding in the car were each independently animated; they only looked like they were connected.

Various interrupts could throw things out of sync - say the user connected a device or put a DVD in a drive. Suddenly passengers were floating in the air behind the car. I suggested that instead of doing an animation on each object, what if there was an abstract animation object that moved around, and objects were attached to it with offsets. Each animation step would compute a new position and orientation for the animation itself, then you would simply assign those values to all the attached objects and apply their offsets.

The team leader basically said great idea but we’re done with that piece. It never got fixed lol.