Wow, nobody has an idea?

Well I have a wild theory then...

If you look closely at my model I made a really bone-headed mistake. It's hard to tell at that angle, but I combined all meshes and then applied a bend deformer to the shield. However, I didn't even think about the shield itself not having the proper subdivisions for bending. The quick radial extrusion method I used caused the lettering and graphics to become disconnected from the faces of the shield. The result was a lot of floating objects and a single attachment point. I didn't even notice it until further inspection.

So, with all that said.. is it possible this terrible geometry threw everything off in the scaling somehow?