Erikari wroteThis may be a stupid question, but try clicking on the
Weights
tool, you should see colored pies, are the pies all of only one color?
It may happen that spine will bind all of the bones but give influence to just one bone with Auto weights. this also happens if you bound one bone first and added all the others later.Here's the part of the guide that explains how this works: http://esotericsoftware.com/spine-weights
I'm sorry you're getting frustrated, did you read properly the http://esotericsoftware.com/spine-user-guide or see the playlist to get you started first?
I'm the sort of person that gets very intimidated by new interfaces and everything seems tremendously difficult at first, but the videos really helped me to learn Spine quickly at the time, so I totally recommend them.
There's also an unofficial discord channel where you can ask quick questions and solve doubts easily: https://discord.gg/sN7BnAH
And of course you can ask here on the forums as you just did, but don't get frustrated alone (:
Thank you so much for the suggestion and for the emotional support! I think a lot of frustration comes from feeling like I'm alone when I can't figure something out.
As far as the specific question goes. Your answer kind of nailed it. I checked and saw that the circles under the "weights" menu were all of the same color (blue in this case), so my bones weren't getting bound properly.
What I did that worked... I selected her skirt, then cleared out all of the bones in the weights menu. I then clicked "bind" and re-added each one. Once they were all added in, I had to make sure to select and highlight them all in the Weights menu, then I hit spacebar. After that a loading menu popped up and began assigning the bindings. After it finished the circles were different colors, and posing the different bones manipulated the skirt properly.
TLDR: I think my mistake was not selecting all of the bones in the weights menu and then hitting spacebar. Apparently this process binds the bones.