Like I'd like to say today wasn't that successful, because I didn't really finish the project or get to a good stopping point.
But the code now deserializes pretty much exactly how I needed it to, and I get what I'm doing with serde now.
And I've found a solution to the infinite data-gather issue, so like it should be a matter of putting it together tomorrow and hopefully getting a minor response back.
If nothing else, I've learned how to setup a local presto cluster?