So I had a moment of horrible stupidity (mostly due to the fact that I'm new to this). The cause was the fact that a full grid was missing, whitch meant there was an open pipe into the manifold...

I was staring at it for probably over half an hour looking for rips when I realized that the "uneven" pattern was a missing grid. I was able to replace my air bleeder though

I put a rubber stopper in the open manifold inlet, secured it with some electrical tape (for good measure) and have now been running it for about 14 hours and seen an AMAZING improvement in water clarity.

As a follow up, as I filter the 5+ lbs of DE back out of my pool, how concerned about over coating the grids should I be? Is it something that I should just watch my preassure gauge, or is there a real danger to the grids having too much DE on them?