Rpi GPIO not working

Thank you Tom, very much! I did edit my post to remove my signs of frustration. It was late last night and I had been working on this most of the entire day, getting nowhere fast.

It is really good to know that a HACS install is not necessary to make this work. I will attempt to completely remove HACS immediately. I did however do the manual installation, not realizing that HACS was not required with a manual install. The guides are sparse, at best and the dependencies on the cloud via github and API keys is just way too much!

The zip file I downloaded decompressed to a folder named ha-rpi_gpio-main. Originally I just put this into the custom_components folder as it was, but have since renamed it to just rpi-gpio. Not sure if this is right or not, as the documentation does not match the results by any means. I will try this again once I get HACKS (sic) removed and see how it goes.

Again, thank you for clearing up some of this confusion.