Welp, I sorta solved my issue but it was kind of a shoe string solution. If I followed your directions, wouldn't any new bone I created automatically be "under" the root bone therefore still influenced by it, i mean - any bone you create seems to automatically be a child of the root (the red line points straight from the new bone to the root)? Basically all bones created cannot superseded the root bone?
My solution: I made a copy of the entire skeleton, I went to the little skeleton figure on the top of the list, and hit "copy," So now I had to exact copy of the skeleton (two rigs). I took one skeleton and deleted all the bones/images except the background. Then I placed that one under the main skeleton. So now I had the main rig on top, I could do any animation to it and it would have no influence to the rig under it. I imagine a similar solution would be to import a another project, this would place the project again in its own root/hierarchy etc.
