Apparently I didn’t fry the THS7314 that was supposed to go into my SNESmini.
Was taking the power filter cap from it for a new amplifier an anon on /vr/ was sending me and decided to poke around at it with a multimeter(again) before doing so. It seems despite completely resoldering and checking it before, a single leg failed to have continuity out to its intended pin.
The leg just so happened to be power, so it wasn’t that the amp was broken, just that it was getting any power to do what it was supposed to. I transplanted the chip over to a new board and threw some 100ohm resistors on it(in the hopes to slightly lower the brightness from the 75 used previously and suggested). Soldered it in and it works.
Still need to check Yoshi’s Island and X1(games I noticed the difference in originally) to confirm the brightness is closer to “normal”, but from what I can see, the encoder bypass has seemingly removed the grey bar. A minute or two of playing with the brightness and contrast while having Super Metroid and Final Fantasy 6 looping can’t seem to get it to rear its ugly head.