want approval/review from both of you before we merge any of this in
I based this off a much more recent version of development, (@chaunmt I still saw courses <1000 while testing, and I thought those were supposed to be entirely removed from the data?)
also I tried to cut out most of the irrelevant commits from the other version of this branch so it's easier to look over
in theory this is stable and we should have no issues with this