Basically, RobotC runs linearly, which means it must finish one line before it can go on to another. In other words, if you press the button to retract the catapult, it will finish retracting the catapult before moving on to anything else. To fix the issue, you would put the presets you have in tasks instead of functions. If you don’t know what tasks are there is an in- depth guide to them here (credit goes to jpearman).
@Alex Baggins posted it in unofficial tech support, so there was no need to make a separate thread to answer the question.