Welcome! I'll mark it as resolved then.

AHA I finally (properly) fixed the issue! I was messing around with the kernel settings and decided to load the intel graphics drivers as a module rather than having it built into the kernel and that fixed it! I no longer have to use 'nomodeset'. I still can't seem to get a successful boot with an initrd file, but since it's not needed for my use case I suppose that doesn't really matter.