Well I hooked it all up, to be honest I expected it to completely fail; instead, a tiny bit of it works.  Initially the LED didn't blink, the board looked dead, and the serial terminal on my PC was blank.  I was quite sad.  Then I thought - perhaps I messed up the pos/neg when I wired up my wall wart plug to the board, so I swapped them.  The LED still didn't light up, but I glanced at my computer and the serial terminal showed data!!!  Specifically the Professor reported he started up but had an error accessing external memory.  This was huge, it wasn't a total failure!!!!

For those of you not aware of the Professor - it's the 'smart chip', an ATMega 162 which handles peripherals, outside communication, etc.  At the moment Gilligan (the 6502) communicates to the outside world via some shared RAM read by the Professor.  So, if the Professor can't access external memory, it has no way of talking to Gilligan - so I really have no idea at the moment if Gilligan is working or not.  I need to solve the Professor external memory problem first.

However, ignoring Gilligan for a second, if the Professor started up why isn't the LED blinking?  It took me a bit of multi-meter debugging to realize I soldered in the LED backwards... totally my fault, I designed the schematic to the wrong pins.  So I laid a second LED on its side with the correct legs touching and it blinks as it should!

So what's next?  I need to figure out why the Professor can't access external memory.  My guess is it's either a bad solder or another messed up line on the schematic.  I'll be checking both over the next few days - I'll report back when I find something!

btw - I need a bunch of jumper wires to hook everything up securely, I ordered these on Amazon:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B073X7P6N2/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o08_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1