I must say farewell for my own mental health’s sake hah…
The touchpad is apparently not reliably fixed at all. I’ve been only using XFCE in order to not lose it, but it’s been gone for two reboots (in XFCE-only) now 
I also cannot seem to get the wireless card working (and considered swapping it out with an older,slower free-firmware model), and I’ve tried solutions in this thread and ones like it on other, non-qubes forums/posts.
I’m super bummed because I think this machine was a waste of a lot of money [because I have a very, very strong desire to be using QubesOS 
]
I will probably move back over to Silverblue for at least the root-immutability. I wish I could stay here…
until we meet again