If I render from frame 1, there's no delay in the render starting. If I render from frame 1000, Backburner takes about an hour to start spitting out frames. It just say's "Busy" and all the cores are running at 100% on the farm. I've never had a problem with this before! I have no idea what's going on... anyone ever…
Holy shit, got it working! We had imported some assets from other scene files and thus got all the crap those scene files had too. Turns out, there's a lot more than just objects that scene files receive when you do an import like that. We had to go in and figure out how to unlock camera and random render nodes hidden away…