That did it! Funny, I thought I'd done that earlier in my testing, but I think I forgot to unload the plist. In either case, it's working now. Thanks so much!!
ok, just to be clear, was the thing that did it removing files from the locations I listed, was it unloading the plist, or was it using the homebrew dbus?
I think it was all three considering I had tried the previous in combinations. I first removed the extra plists from those locations and installed homebrew's dbus, but that didn't work. After I unloaded the plist, it was good to go. Since I removed the extra plists, I didn't check dbus + unloading kstars' plist.