Well, 9 months later and finally an update. The tank has gone through several stages and is finally doing very well on it's own.
At first I had massive hair algae problems and couldn't get the HC to outgrow the algae that was growing on it. I call this, "The dark ages". I didn't even take any pictures during this time because I couldn't stand the way it looked. I trimmed back the
Nesaea, Rotala, and
H. micranthemoides several times because it was all being overwhelmed by algae. The riccia and java fern were also taken out. The first batch of HC I planted was taken out and I made the following changes to my setup:
-Cut the amount of light in half, down to 1 x 36watt 10k PC
-Got rid of the DIY CO2 (I got lazy and it was too much of a hassle) and went with a pressurized setup
I replanted the HC and added a half dozen neon tetras and now 9 months later the tank is doing excellent. My HC lawn is thicker than I ever thought it would get, giving the wild cherries plenty of places to hide from the tetras when they're freshly hatched. I also have a small snail problem, but I figure they diversify the system and help keep some of the algae in check. I manually remove a bunch of them when I do water changes.
I'm no photographer, but these photos show basically what the tank looks like now:
Without flash:
With flash:
