After happily ordering my project directory I discovered that my animatic was completely stuffed – “what’s this?!?! Absolute file paths!? Damn you!” So remember kiddies that there is an option in the settings pull-down (mouse to the border of the top menu bar and you will be able to stretch it to reveal hidden stuff) File Paths > Relative Paths Default. Unfortunately this then only applies to new links created so I had to go through and relink all the images in the animatic to the new ones.
It would not of been too bad if the Animatic directory wasn’t such a mesh mess [ha! too much modelling!] to begin with: at the beginning I thought (for some stupid reason) that it would be best to use .jpg exports as the animatic images. Later I discovered that it was much cleaner and easier to modify if I linked the actual .psd files in the sequencer.
Yes I tried to Remap Paths (SHIFT-RKEY) and although that always looked promising, it never seemed to do anything at all. CKEY saved my life: you still have to do it manually but you can exchange the current non-existent images with the correct ones rather than building the entire sequence again *shudder*.