Very educational and helpful- thanks! I'll try to improve my posts going forward 
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One thought I had overnight was that, the only time I've actually seen the serial monitor work properly has been when I have run the ConsoleRead example sketch.
Again, since I'm going over wifi, I wonder if it wouldn't make sense to replace all the serial monitor stuff with console read stuff and give that a try. If it works, I'd be able to actually see what the mcu is doing and/or if there are any errors when it attempts to run this curl command.
I can go back and look at that ConsoleRead sketch and see if I can figure out how to replace the serial monitor coding with console coding, but if you have any thoughts on this either way and/or if you have any advice as to console coding requirements, please let me know. Thanks.