So I continue to make progress. I pulled new speaker wire to every door... while I bitched as I was doing it, I was pleased when it was done. Just relying on wires and splices and connections that were 20 years old and had already survived at least one prior install was really not worth it to me. Now I have a straight lime of speaker wire without any breaks from the amplifier all the way to each speaker. Since I am running the tweeters and woofers from the separates on different amplifier channels, I do not even have the break at a crossover, as that will be handled by the amp and DSP.
I also put about 6-8 feet of vibration damping materials on each door. It was something I definitely got better at, but unfortunately for me, I started with the drivers door when I was still figuring out the coverage. The rear doors are done quite well. The key, I think, is to put more on the exterior shell than the interior facing shell. The inside has so many bends in it that there are only a few places that could be prone to resonate - mostly right around the speaker hole, which I have 2+ layers of Damplifier on those sections. Also don't forget you can put it on both sides of the interior wall of the door. After how good the rear doors came out, I may get some more on the drivers door.
The next step I expected to be the worst... but to be honest, so far it has not been! That is getting enough space to get the luxury liner pro sound blocking to fit under the door card. My solution below was well worth the time. Two poster boards taped together allowed me to trace and mark all the places that needed to be cut. And since the doors are largely the same, doing a template for one door should work for the other side too. I cut the front doors from the template today... and will tackle the rears tomorrow, hopefully. Happy with the results so far. Waiting on some grill cloth to redo the grills, then can reinstall.... but the test fits looked promising!
Finally, I hollowed out and re-set new tweeters in the pods. The tweeters I am using came with about 5 different clips to help mount the tweeter in all sorts of different manners... but ultimately, the best thing I could do was to just cut out some of the interior plastic in the tweeter pods and just align the tweeters with some black caulk. Still setting, but should be good solution.
Next I have to get the power cables from the battery into the headunit... any recommendations on the best place to cross the firewall? I am a little tight on power wire, so have to find the most direct route. I also made the decision to run the ground wires back to the battery to (largely) eliminate the chances of ground loop noise that so many have fought with on here in the past.
