I went through and fixed a lot of bugs in my gradient descent step-size chooser.  I should have had an intermediate commit though - at the moment, the whole step-size chooser has been replaced with just a maximum step, for which I wrote norm functions for each model.  I was still getting it telling me - every time, no matter what, that my model proposals with smaller and smaller step sizes were always a LITTLE bit better, but none of them were EVER better than the original model.  I think I'm just tired and need to take a fresh look tomorrow.