Now here's the problem. When any part of Admin tools is enabled, installing templates results in them being given the name "JLIB_INSTALLER_DEFAULT_STYLE" under styles. One has to manually click that JLIB name and enter the appropriate style name/sitename/slogan and then everything shows correctly.
Since my template was created with artisteer i initially thought something was up with that, but they pointed me after some research to http://www.joomlart.com/forums/showthread.php?95799-Jlib_installer_default_style
since i don't feel comfortable editing extension files (who knows what the impact would be down the road i'll use that manual work around for now but i figured i'd report it nonetheless so it could be fixed
that joomlart topic seems to indicate that it's limited to the system redirect plugin, but that's not the case. With that one disabled and the installer part enabled it still happens.