Ahh, thanks for the clarification. Sorry to dredge up such a mess of information, theres just lot of conflicting information around regarding this and I wasn't sure how to sort it out. Didnt mean to just disregard the help you offered with the MCUfriend library either, if I was just wiring this on an Arduino that would be my first choice, I just wasn't sure how closely it resembled what I'm trying to do in python, since you said that it is slightly different and I'm doing this from scratch, I just didn't want to confuse myself even more (which I did anyway, of course).
But I didn't realize that open smart had their own specific software as well, the supplier I got this from has just been giving me half-assed incomplete information. But I'll definitely look into that for additional reference now, and I'll certainly have to look more into 8080(-8 and -16) interfaces as well.
Thanks so much for the help! And sorry for such a headache