Seth,
awesome to see your thoughts again - especially since I have been doing trial and error all day. Not used to eMMC at all (am used to Linux and RPi to a mild degree).
Had no luck at all with the ‘latest’ distro’s (which date back to 2020). However, on the forum, the latest Debian 11+ xcfs is doing fairly well, running off SD card.
So, playing around with that now 
Again, TY!
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