Finally figured out how to setup CF cards for my Amiga! I even got one configured effectively as a bootable hard drive with Workbench and the dang thing actually works either in WinUAE or my physical Amiga.
I found that doing the prep work in a virtual machine running kickstart 3.x works ... ran into various obstacles with kickstart 2.0x.
Not going to call myself an Amiga guru quite yet
However, I'm understanding the functioning & setup requirements a great deal better than just a couple weeks ago.