I created a follower of its own race and set it to level with the player and created a unique class to properly assign skills so that the follower gains access to increasingly powerful spells it and the player level up together. Unfortunately, when I check the followers stats with UFO, the follower despite being level 44, has no skills or attributes allocated anywhere. I go to the creation kit and I can set the minimum level for the NPC to, say, 25, and the default attributes and skills will change appropriately - as I want them to in game. I made sure iAVDhmsLevelUp

was set to 8, as it should be by default, but this had no effect. I have reason to believe that UFO isn't lying to me, because when I take the character into combat, she does not utilize any of the spells that require higher levels of the destruction skill.

What am I missing? This is immensely frustrating and I would very much appreciate assistance.

As usual, overthinking it. Just needed to the character to spawn upon entering her cell for these changes to apply instead of loading already in the cell with her...