Having a laser catch trigger a panel animation change. But what it starts with to what it ends with has no built in animation. In order to make it smooth I have to do one animation then sequence to the next, and end with the final position idle animation. When I put the "setanimation" trigger in, then a second one with or without a 1 second trigger, it will fire the first animation and stop there. Any ideas?

Add two logic branches and a logic branch listener connected to the two branches.
On the catcher, have it tell the panel to start animating and to set branch A to true, branch B to false and tell the prop to start animating.
On the animating object, set an Output for 'OnAnimationDone' and have it set branch B to true.
On the logic branch listener, have an Output for 'OnAllTrue' and have it both set Branch A and B to false (to reset) and play the second animation.
This will only work for the activation animation, you'll need to use other logic objects for a deactivation set of animations.