After quite a hunt, we managed to find a fairly clean, responsive theme, that actually works. Granted that doesn't sound like it should be a difficult thing, but trust me.,, it is!
Many themes were not as advertised, not as pictured, or just didn't work at all. In the end a GPL based theme (thank you University of Indiana!) just needed some modifications to work. We also adjusted the theme to host CSS, JS, and fonts locally rather than pulling from their repository (not sure that was their intent, but they published it that way)
The result, is the theme you see before you (as of the writing of this article at least)
Yes, it's simple and fairly basic. But the images work, it's readable, and after all, that's all we really wanted.
So now we can get on with actually creating content! YEA!