I've been cleaning up as I go. I went ahead and tried hardening all the "flat" edges, and it's apparent even from [tab] mode that it did the trick.
On a related topic, have you ever extracted a face from something and found that you have "1 face in 2 objects" selected? it's never happened to me before this model, and i've had to delete a few objects and start them over because once it happens I can't edit them without an internal error popping up.

way weird.