As far as the flash descriptor, i was able to dump the firmware via fpt -d and then i turned around and updated it with the downloaded on via fpt -f without any errors which leads me to believe the descriptors are RW enabled. let me try the process again, maybe I screwed up the settings on the updated firmware.
EDIT: SUCCESS! I repeated the steps with the original dump, but this time i saw a post around additional configuration settings in FIT. these seemed to do the trick on my workstation.
Now i just need to figure out why the NIC is no longer working…