Ok guys, I know this is going to kill any credibility I might have ever had but....the interface names, and places on the motherboard did not line up... So I was using igb0 (first port from left) for WAN, igb1 (second port) for LAN, and igb2 (third port) for OPT1. It turns out, port 1 is igb0, port 2 is igb2, and port 3 is igb3. I figured it was 0 1 2 3.
I discovered this by using the "auto-assignment" feature, I never thought that the numbers wouldn't be sequential.
And thus, I am now able to access the webConfigurator. Lesson of the day: Don't trust random almost no-name Chinese MFGs to make everything sensical.
I'm adding this post for posterity to make sure they remember to chickity check themselves before they spend 8 hours troubleshooting what seems like an insane problem.
Also I found this document at some point to help me achieve what I want to for my pass-through style: http://users.ox.ac.uk/~clas0415/assets/Setting-up-pfSense-as-a-Stateful-Bridging-Firewall-with-commodity-hardware.pdf