After a very productive conversation with David this morning, this is resolved. Here are the steps I went through:

- Removed the smith.quickorderentry section from the manifest of 3.8 and attempted to install. Still got the same error, this time right after smith.featuredproducts. Therefore, it wasn't erroring out on the quickorderentry module, it was erroring out on the next step in the module install process after reading the manifest.

- Attempted to install 3.8.5 as David advised that install is different in that version from 3.8. Still got the same error

- Successfully installed 3.6. Therefore, whatever install problems there are in my environment got introduced between 3.6 and 3.8.

- Copied the website payments standard hotfix into the bin directory (3.8 hotfix on top of 3.6 install)

- Completed a round trip transaction and successfully got the payment complete page

Thanks for the help David!