9/24 update: Our code lord and savior visited my house today to see my baby...but also to help set me up with a working local environment to try to tackle AE head-on. I have high hopes now of making real progress...
9/10 update: Turns out, the amount of PHP that I know is far outweighed by the amount of PHP I don't know. Hoping I stumble upon the solution sooner than later.
9/4 update: The database was migrated from SQL 4 to SQL 5.0, but the site is now acting weird. Still working on figuring out what is up with that.