FIXED:
So after about 8 hrs of debugging and research I came across a post about being people being restricted to 1001 products in a category. Could 1001 be related to my 101… YES.
Hopefully this helps others out in the future
Simply increasing a value in php.ini to a higher number worked
max_input_vars = 1000
The related post that I found was here. It\’s possibly due to a PHP function \"parse_str\", however I have not traced through each file to confirm this is the root of the error.
Please add to this post if you have a code fix for this issue as raising the max_input_vars can open yourself to attacks based on hash collisions.