Thank you very much for your response, redram. I've seen you in a lot of the forum posts I've gone through with a lot of helpful tips, debugging information and so forth so I'm thankful that you got back to me so quickly!
I'm really digging this so far, and if there's anything I can do to assist in tracking this down, I'm happy to help.
From an observational standpoint, I used clutches in the demo world to change the drive train states, there's a clear animation lag/change that happens with the drivetrain when the clutch is engaged from moving to not. The side behavior of this is the RPMs to the axels go phenomenally fast as opposed to single gear norms. This raises my thought process to wonder if its too many actions per tick on updating other attached blocks. As seen in the demo, it will work, at high RPMs from anywhere to .01 seconds to 2 or 3 seconds before freezing in place abruptly. Youtube video of it in action