Turns out this is me being an idiot and duplicating the project files to test and forgetting to put the live_enabled macro back in.
The image_xscale bug is still happening, but at this point I may just have to accept it, because I have zero leads on that, other than it only applying to select objects (that are all solid, if that explains the bug any). (EDIT: This is untrue, it applies to every stretched object.)