Do you think it is worth trying to make web3 work asynchronously or should I jump ship to ethjs

My continual research it telling me that current versions of web3.js do not support promises out of the gate, and that really I should be using eth.js to do this properly... is this an accurate assessment?

Thanks for your help again. Let me know if anything in my answer looks wrong.

Thank you, this answered my question. To say it in a way that makes more sense to me: (1) The full ABI for a token is only available if you have the solidity source code, which is not on the blockchain decompiled. (2) You can use Etherscan.io as a basic api for contract ABIs. (3) You do NOT need the full ABI for a contract to interact with it. You only need to define the functions in the ABI which you want to interact with, and ERC20 has standardized this, so you can always have a baseline ABI when interacting with these tokens.