Thanks to some help from bishop and my friend I figured out what the problem. As bishop stated "It encodes, rather than mirrors, the content's structure" which I didn't realize. I thought it directly altered whatever directory(ies) were imported into it
So basically what I did was
- Perform steps 1-3 (setting up and adding the directory to the repo) then
- Delete the existing folder that was imported into the repo and checkout in the same location
Basically [2] allowed me to have a remote working copy on the server (with the expected .svn folders).
That way, whenever I committed my local copy, the post-commit hook would update the remote working copy (on the server) as expected.