Update: I ended up biting the bullet and purged my C drive enough to have enough space for the game. Then I needed to do a complete reinstall (just moving the files over didn't work, guess it was indeed a file corruption and not just a file pathing issue). After I did all that, the game finally works. That being said, I am not certain if I will have enough space for all of 7.X or not. Especially if the devs get trigger happy and keep bloating future patches with graphical updates like the monster of a file that was 7.1 which was over 8gbs of data.

Hope someone finds a workaround for hdd/ssd users. I'd rather keep all my games there.