OK, rookie mistake that I should not be making.
I was initially using IntelliJ and going by the messages in logcat. I tried everything I could, and then I switched IDE to Eclipse and voila, logcat now says call to exec() of unknown plugin. I have no idea why IntelliJ did not output this or why I totally skipped Step #2 of the Manual Installation Guide!
Anyway as embarrassed as I am to say it, this sorted me out.