Can you let me know where these posts are? It sounds like people are giving bad advice over there. 1.1.1 is not expected to work on recent IDE versions, due to the Arduino developers being apparently unable to resist fiddling with the spec for third party hardware incessantly.
There's nothing special about PA7 (arduino pin 3). It should work normally...
I should have looked for that link before posting about it... I searched my history for it and I can't find it now. It may very well have been an old page. It also may be me misreading something or being senile. All I remember specifically is that something got me to go into the board manager and downgrade it, I just can't find it now. I apologize.
Thank you for all the help! It's great to have this new chip to work with.