Ok, so I had some more time today to mess with it and was able to use pretty much any a-b cable I have to flash via ODIN (OG Droid cable being one of them).
After I successfully made several flashes with ODIN, I went back to investigating the USB Debugging issues, and low and behold, it was working. Im not sure what changed but I sent a few ADB commands on several non-samsung cables with no problems.
Originally I was thinking maybe there was a jumper or something in the authentic samsung cable to tell the device if it was official or not, but now Im not sure.
Are you on a stock rom or something different?