Thanks! That ordering might be it, but after some playing around, I believe it's all on SpriteKit itself. For anyone else that might be using it, I found this unresolved question on StackOverflow that seems similar: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/33770176/spritekit-node-zrotation-doesnt-keep-aspect-ratio-of-node-when-child-of-another#comment65871923_33770176
It might be expected behavior for SpriteKit, but applying rotations and scaling to ancestors morphs the child node.