Hi Jason,
yes, I'm sure about getting persistence (I made some changes, e.g. a new wallpaper, I found again rebooting), about having tce in /dev/sda2 and about having ntfs-3g working through the ntfs-3g.gz, all of this when I use the dCore-jessie.gz I built simply replacing the path /usr/sbin/ntfs-3g with /bin/ntfs-3g in rebuildfstab...