FOUND THE PROBLEM!
1) It all stems from the typical usb-stick(s) only environment and drive-ordering.
2) If this is wrong, the gui utils will still allow you to go through the motions thinking everything is ok, but it is NOT.
Setup:
A: You successfully burn a bootable stick from the iso. No problem, it all looks nice.
B: Insert another stick to use for persistence. Run tce-setdrive and properly identify that new stick device name for use.
C: Make a small junk textfile as a test to prove persistence after reboot. Reboot.
D: *** Depending on how your machine boots up the drive*** which it will, if you use the MOUNT-TOOL and hover over your devices and display labels, if you are lucky, they will match to the device name. BUT, if your machine brings up these sticks in a different order, MOUNT-TOOL if you hover, will show that the LABELS are backwards! Ie, the label does not match the device name , ie sdb1, sdc2 and so forth have the wrong labels.
E: The thing that can throw you is that the EXIT util, where it shows the device pathname it is going to save your mydata.tgz will ALSO be wrong, yet IT will still write to the proper device as initially set up in tce-setdrive! This is the false sense of security - if you don't pay attention, you won't notice the disparity unless you put a magnifying glass sense of attention to the device path it wants to save to.
HACKER SOLUTION:
Before you do anything involving tce-setdrive, or using the TC-installer gui, use the MOUNT TOOL and hover to be sure your drives are labeled as what they say they are. If not, change ports of the sticks until they do!
Then go ahead.
Ie, my machine boots the 3.1usb ports first, but when I initially burned my iso, I booted it from a random 2.0 port. Which worked, but as I quickly found out upon reboot, with my persistence stick in use, the device assignments were totally jacked up.
Advanced users will quickly notice this by running blkid, which doesn't match the mounted device name.
And most troubling of all, is that the EXIT util, even though showing the wrong device pathname to save to, actually does save to the right device.
Ultimately, UUID's are the answer, in the cheatcodes or by manually editing your bootloader since we've seen that the mount-tool can get the labels backwards, depending on how your machine sees them first.
So there you go - advanced users use blkid and go to town. Hackers, just change the order of your usb stick ports after creation, and hover with mount-tool to make sure the labels are correct before going any further.