Essentially, I was having trouble with the permissions transferring over, specifically, I was having trouble eval()'ing the scripts I was downloading. I actually found it odd that you were able to, but the rules that govern background.js are apparently different (there has also been a bug regarding background.js eval() in the past, it apparently was fixed though.) than content scripts. 

Also, the 'unsafe-eval' security will only apply to sites we specify under 'permissions', the actual line is just there to eval scripts.