I'm getting good at answering my own questions here 
Just wanted to share. I used the program DMC_STARTER on a table that had not been replicated yet. It looks like it does indeed execute with a full load when you execute the program with the following settings. Afterwards, the table does not show in the Data Transfer Monitor of LTRC since I guess it's categorized as a "test run"?
Anyhow - by letting this hit an ABAP dump and then choosing the debugger, I was able to find the error in my code. What is interesting, is that during "real" replication or loading, the process never threw a hard error, so it was difficult to troubleshoot.
Regards,
Justin