Thank you Harald! I've been using Spine for a little over a year but recently just upgraded to Pro 😃
Okay, I figured the "dipping" issue wasn't the same thing I was experiencing based on the posts about it.
Regarding how I'm moving my character around, he has a capsule collider and rigid body attached to it. The "PlayerCharacter" script calculates the "next" move vector based on the Player's input and passes that vector to the "CharacterController2D" script, which adds the vector to it's current position and calls RigidBody.MovePosition. I'd be happy to share snippets if needed. Debugging the Vector that is passed to the controller script at the time of the "visual dip" the y vector is constantly -2, which is essentially the gravity calculation constant when grounded.
Here is the hierarchy of my character:
As far as the Spine visuals go, there is a child gameObject on my "Player" object that contain the standard SkeletonAnimation and an Animation Handle script that is nearly identical to the Platformer script in the Unity SDK examples provided: