I'm going to push forward a bit further with the boost converter... Pulled the assembly off my solderless breadboard and direct soldered my components to the DIP adapter to keep leads as short as possible. See attached picture.
Works now... at least, it gives me expected output voltage. Not sure about EMI, ripple current, efficiency or anything else yet. But if I can get the whole project working with it, then things should only get better when it gets PCB-ized, right?.