Unless what i'm seeing is some kind of bug in the cocos2dx runtime but appears to do same in spine. keyframe the root bone to be its default position of 0,0, move the bone to say 0,100 and set another key frame. Now if you run a looped anim you will see the bone move 100 pixels vertically. Now going back to setup and setting the scale to 0.25,0.25. At this point if we had any textures they would be 25 percent their original size. However running the animation you will see the bone still moves 100 pixels vertically not 25 as would be expected.
I know i could use cocos's scale to do this, but would be nice to actually fully scale down or up my spine anims within spine. Hope that helps clarify things.