Thank you for the reply! On your advice, I took a step back and created a new page, form, and ajaxbutton. Creating a FormTester and using executeAjaxEvent(...) does indeed submit the form through via standard form processing! However, it's still not happening on my original page. I'm looking into why that might be right now, and I will post my findings when I get to the bottom of it. Thanks again. Wicket is awesome.
--pete