Twig Tokens in Views not Rendering Inside an HTML Element
Problem solved. There were two issue at play; first off when I was messing with the Twig templates to trying and format the view the hard way, I inserted an extra &lt;a href=""&gt; in one of the templates and failed to remove it. My template was wrapping the empty tag around the properly generated content making it useless. 

The second problem was that for some odd reason, the block was calling/using the same custom theme hook twice. I haven't figured out what was causing this error, but deleting the bock and forcing the new one to revert to a more general template hook solved the rendering issue. 

However Twig debug still shows that there are two custom theme hooks of the same name available for use. No clue what is causing this behavior.