Alright, I had to open up a support ticket to get a resolution to this problem. A couple things I wanted to share in case someone else stumbles upon this post with the same problems:
I had to move my installation to a spare computer, the 7541 never worked for me as installation hardware.
The support guy said that they've seen issues with the / drive being larger than 4GB so he had me resize that and add the rest of the drive capacity to /usr.
Serial output is disabled in the standard kernel and I had to use the embedded kernel.
Netgate's old documentation stated that LAN was port 5 and WAN was port 6…. after a fresh install with embedded kernel and the ability to console again we found that not to be true.
These 4 adjustments finally made it work and I'm back up and running. Hopefully this will help somebody else in the future.