To any future adventurers:
Turns out, there was no problem with any of the hardware, my Gotek and breakout adapter were the real problem.
I did not realize that the system cares about what media type is being reported (1 or 2 sides). Whatever type media the original disk was on needs to on 50...
Any 8" machine experts around? I am trying to bring up a 6000 and have some sort of error when trying to install Xenix. Here's where I am so far:
cleaned out dust (good lord was it ever dusty!)
replaced filter caps and some leaky electrolytics
cleaned floppy disk drive
got one of the diagnostic...