Man I feel dumb - Unity animations and scaling.

Don't, just don't change the scaling of an object inside Unity. Even if your object has 50 polygons.
It'll f@(k your fps. Pardon the language but it'll just ruin your day if you are doing for mobile. Just take the extra time to make your scaling animation in your 3D package of choice and save the animation as blendshapes or whatever it's called in there.
I just wanted to squish 2 bellows. But nooooo. I have to do the whole blendshapes thing. Can't just change the z value.
Sorry, I know it messes up with batching, but I just didnt' expect to lose close to 25fps.
(And I blamed my rigidbodies. Sorry bodies....)

2nd Maya/Unity quicky. (animating object with multiple individual meshes)

Have you tried to put your animated FBX from Maya and it would just go to 0,0,0 when you pressed play? (If you don't freeze the model before you export it, do so. Freeze it at 0,0,0 to save some extra trouble later on)

The reason for that is that most probably you have nested the meshes under a parent mesh in the Outliner panel and then on top, you've added keyframes to that parent. At least that was my problem when throwing it in Unity.
What you should do instead is select your meshes, group them, and then go in and add your keyframes and blend shapes. Export and your combined object won't crap itself in Unity.