I kicked around the chown. Wound up figuring out that suPHP wasnt enabled. suEXEC was, but php wasnt running in suPHP (if that makes sense).
I rebuilt php via easyapache, then enabled suPHP at the end. Probably overkill, but better safe than sorry.
Once I had uploaded files, i logged into to my site (not root) on this particular domain and ran the commands
find ~/public_html/ -type d -exec chmod 755 {} \;
find ~/public_html/ -type f -exec chmod 644 {} \;
Once that was done, WP install was done verbatim. No issues at all.
Yes, this is something you all know. However, I wanted to post my solution just in case someone stumbles across this thread from a search engine.
