Well, apparently it is not that easy. I STILL cannot produce a decent hash. I've been working with an older version of cgminer that supports BTC mining, and I've written a program to act as a fake pool which serves up the exact same block every time. I've hacked the cgminer code to freeze the timestamp and extranonce2 and nonce to the values in my mined share. I'm having trouble figuring our where to set the nonce, so I'm not done yet, but in the meantime, I've discovered that cgminer uses a liner approach to create the merkle root, NOT a binary tree hash. I've also discovered that there is an endian change, not byte-wise, but a 32-bit endian change that I had no idea existed.

So many more pieces of the puzzle are now solved, but the puzzle is not solved yet ...