Turns out that the remote worked like a dream, but once the remote was operating smoothly the IR Blaster stopped working. After further testing it appeared that I could only get ONE device to work at a time- whichever device was operating on /dev/lircd.
BAH.
After much research, turns out there is an issue in the script that resides at /etc/init.d/lirc. Who knew?.
Fixed that one line by hand, restarted lirc, and BOOM- remote is working like a champ.