Adjusting scale/position of clip WITHIN the mask, WITHOUT moving the mask

I've been tearing my hear out for about a week. I've tried opacity masks, crops, track mattes: nothing is working. 

I have two 16:9 clips of a podcast host + guest that I want to crop into 4:3, that fall within some framelines i've created. Using track matte it works, but when I try to adjust scale or transform, it adjusts the entire mask. I cannot figure out a way to simply move the footage in the layer below while keeping the mask in the position i need it to be. I've been searching around and even found several solutions, but it seems premiere pro removed this ability with an update, unless I am missing something. I've tried the methods in both videos and in both cases I cannot adjust the scale without adjusting the entire mask, even when using offset (no scale) and additional transform (cant move it above opacity effect).

I created a MOGRT file with media placeholders to try and rectify, but since the podcasts are around 1 hour in length, the encoding time balloned to nearly 5 hours per episode.

please someone help me. I'm nearly willing to pay someone for their time to solve this as I cannot beleive something like this isnt possible in premiere pro