Trying to access an old wallet.dat
While I did wait for the blockchain to download and to see if Bitcoin-Core could simply read its own file. The program failed to read in any of the info from my wallet.dat file, even after following the instructions in the post listed in my initial question. I ended up using walletool, which worked without a hitch. It gave me a list of every public and private key associated with the wallet. It has a script for checking your balance, but I was unable to get it to work reasonably quickly and ended up manually checking the balances of each address using bitref.