So I've got the standard \listoffigures problem wherein my figures are numbered within sections, so in my List of Figures the numbers overwrite the caption. Normally, people can use the following two lines of code to fix this, in their preambles:
This throws a "Missing }" error on the "\tableofcontents" line. I'm using the Texlive distribution under OS X, so Im not sure where I should have posted the topic, but it seems like a tocloft problem.
It took me a while to get back to this as I've just been worrying about my content instead of my layout, but this fixed the problem. When I have more time, I'm going to pick apart why this all happened in the first place, but for now, I'm just going to thank you for your acceptable workaround.