Very interesting, thank you! i mostly drone as a hobby to get some interesting shots, so this is my first foray into using it to do anything like this. Indeed I am talking about odm_orthophoto_render.tif, I assumed it was the higher resolution one because of the size (about 3x the size of the other two), and qGIS was not treating odm_orthophoto.tif well, but after closer inspection looks like qGIS just didn't like odm_orthophoto.tif because it was having trouble loading it full resolution, but it did end up loading it correctly if I gave it a few more moments to load, and works really well!

Thanks so much for the ad hoc tech help, will definitely be playing with this more!