So technically the above worked – I CAN use the Edimax EW-7611ULB combo bluetooth/wifi dongle after following the directions in that link I posted..
...but weird stuff is happening:
1.) The keyboard (Rii mini, 2.4ghz dongle variety) is now ALWAYS player one. I mean ALWAYS. I unplug the keyboard, hit "A" on a hard-wired controller to start a game, and the keyboard is somehow still player 1 and I have to plug the keyboard back in in order to hit "Select + Start" to exit out of a game. Never had that happen before. Furthermore, my bluetooth controllers ALWAYS took priority (i.e. Player 1, then Player 2, etc) over hard-wired controllers no matter what port they were plugged into (don't play mutiplayer that often but I'm pretty sure that's how it always worked).
2.) WiFi doesn't auto connect. When I go into WiFi setup it even gives me an IP address ending in 140 which totally looks like it's connected if it has an IP address...but it's not really connected (can't SSH or FTP in for example). When I click on connect to a wireless network, re-enter my same password, it then connects, but the IP address changes to end in 12 (which has also never happened since my router I believe always saves the same IP address for a specific dongle...which is how my FTP bookmarks never fail to work).
3.) Since something is screwy, when I unplug the combo dongle, and (reboot) then plug back in the regular bluetooth dongle (which ALWAYS worked before - no special compiling of drivers needed) -- for the life of me I can't get my 8BitDo wireless controller to connect now (tried 2 different bluetooth controllers).