So in my frustration I decided to go ahead and try the other wifi card I had on hand, the 2915ABG with the iwi driver.
It was no longer giving me firmware errors and after clearing all configs and connecting with
ifconfig iwi0 nwid hotspot wpakey password
then
dhclient -v iwi0
It's working.
I actually couldnt believe it when I saw dhclient saying "lease accepted"
Now I just need to figure out where to fit these antennas
