Bitnami Installation forcing me to flush caches while theming
Update for anyone who comes here in the future:

Bitnami comes with Google PageSpeed installed &amp; enabled by default It's a pretty useful tool, but it's tricky to figure out what's caching your css when there's nothing apparent.

To check for it, take a look at the  of your drupal site &amp; look through the &lt;meta&gt; &amp; &lt;style&gt; tags for compressed css files, they'll look like lkjsdhf.gkdfsgklkshr.pagespeed.kljhasdfgk.ljsdhflgk or somesuch.

To disable it, navigate to your installation's apache configuration folder, mine was /home/bitnami/stack/apache2/conf &amp; edit pagespeed.conf

Look for the line ModPagespeed on (mine was line 20) and change on to off

After that, restart Apache. You can also log into AWS and reboot your instance.