If anyone else ever comes across this, patch did fail me here, and xnurbs came to the rescue. I'm going to continue to try and diagnose why to further my understanding. I'll post when I find out why this was happening.

Figured it out if anyone ever runs into this issue. At roughly 4 minutes into the tutorial, when scaling out the loft guide curves, my pivot was not set to Bounding Box, but Active point. I was then snapping my pivot to the center, which mean my points were scaling on two axis instead of one.