After purchacing a lightly used Appeal I started looking for alternate root methods (to preserve the stock recovery) and I found it. By replacing Samsung's adbd with an AOSP one from CM7, I was able to gain FULL root access via adb. Meaning I can pull partitions and write to the filesystem, but the device has no su binary (which is what grants apps root). A stock recovery image and the unlocked boot.img will be up later today.