@mrehorstdmd I appreciate your help and I'm sorry for what will be a very anticlimatic conclusion.

The board wasn't lying when it reported a bad password, because it was a bad password - I had misremembered a single character in it. One of those days I guess.

But for anyone in the future who may find this post I can confirm that;

Capitals, lowercase and spaces in the SSID work, apostrophes will also probably work if you escape them Same goes for the passwords, and it can take 25 character length

I'm sorry for wasting everyones time.