Hi Phil,
The original issue “Column fade animations not working” seems to be caused by the customization you made on the child theme. I don’t know which customization but if you switch to the parent PRO theme you’ll see that the fade-in effect works, with or without slider.
Regretfully, the new Column doesn’t have the fade effect option, If you want to use the fade effect, you can use the Classic ROW as default child which contains the Classic Column, you can follow the instruction provided here.
We are planning on adding this feature but in a different way. We’re going to build a way to add fade and transition controls to all elements. For example, instead of an entire column, you could fade just a button. Or maybe you want to animate in an entire row? The new system will also allow for hover state changes to be applied to different elements. It will most likely be a new set of controls under the “Customize” tab.
Unfortunately, there is no ETA about this. But as soon as we have a timeframe we will provide information on our changelog page.
Thanks,