Finally got it running and recognizing the WAN.
I deleted the EFI disk and it finally booted decent-ish. froze at the same screen, but if i goto boot environment, cycle through the 3 options, then hit escape and press 1 to boot to multi user, it boots fine
sooo, no idea whats going on there. As soon as i re-add the EFI disk, it shits the bed again.
doing the fsck command in single user still does not work either...