Hey, nice work so far!
- You can use K-GFF to update the appearance (a value named "Appearance_Type" at the top) to point to the non vanilla row.
You will want to let the TSL Patcher do that dynamically once you're ready to turn things into a downloadable mod, but that can wait.
- Lips not moving: that means you are referencing lip files that are not included in the module the character is in at that moment. You can extract them from another module that does include them, to the Override folder.
How to look for the ones you need: copy a mod file (one that contains _loc) or a bunch of them from the lips folder to the modules folder. In KotOR Tool you can now check which lip files it contains, the mod will appear under Kotor I -> ERFs -> Modules. Pretty easy to clean up afterwards because of the _loc in the filename.
That's all for now, good luck! 🙂