anyone actually getting google to crawl your site successfully?

Yes, but crawling and indexing get mixed up a lot. Getting Google to crawl is the easy part - submit a sitemap in Search Console and look at the crawl stats report, it's probably visiting already. Getting pages indexed is harder, and that's mostly about quality and internal links. A page nothing links to that says the same as fifty other pages will sit in "crawled - currently not indexed" forever. What does your Pages report show?