Zork, thank you for your comment. I was previously using your AddMessage and skinChat loop, however, I was running into issues with tainting the DefaultAddMessage portion of AddMessage and the replacement in the skinChat loop. I posted about it here:
https://www.wowinterface.com/forums/...ad.php?t=56773 in case you were interested in what I was finding.
This is my (probably shitty) attempt at not tainting the new communities section by having to go through a very verbose method as I'm describing in this thread. That is, instead of simply taking control of the DefaultAddMessage and getting the taint, I have to filter ALL messages across all event types and properly "skin" their appearance.