Thank you @Retsam. When you point these things out, they seem really simple.
Here’s the best forum post I could find for proper y+
In fact, I was probably several orders of magnitude too thick on my boundary layer. I made the simple excel calculator there and ended up with the final layer thickness as a function of expansion ratio and y+=1 for my reference length from the calculator here: http://www.pointwise.com/yplus/