I'VE DONE IT!!! What a wild ride. I ended up using the Stored Procedures for things. Going that route did the trick nicely. Though I did have to spend the weekend learning SQL to understand exactly what the hell is going on inside of Stored Procedures haha.
But, I've now got the code I need to go from 0 to a deployed ProGet instance programmatically. Still a bit of polishing left to do, and a whole heck of a lot of testing but I am super excited about this! Thank you very much for the Stored Procedure hint!!! I very much appreciate it.