Okay, so I've continued working on this and I've discovered that by grounding the unused pins on the expansion header by assigning them to an output source fed by GND I can add multiple switches to control multiple output pins without any trouble. The switches are controlling the voltage levels on the assigned pins just fine now!
One last problem remains though, in that I'm still having trouble receiving input even with the trick above. I tried assigning one of the GPIO pins to LEDG[7] with the idea being that I could feed GPIO[0] back into it and see if the LED would light up. Instead, the programming failed spectacularly, with multiple random hex segments lit up, LEDG[7] lit continuously with no input, and nothing else working. So clearly that was a disaster. Any ideas on where I can proceed next?