Thank you!!! This was it. Sure enough virtually all the tables were MyISAM. Converted them to InnoDB and the installation completed.
Just in case anyone else comes across this issue, here's what I did.
Logged into the MySQL instance (I was able to do this in phpMyAdmin).
Switched to the database for the forum:
use <Your_DB_Name_Here>;
Check the engine being used on the tables:
show table status;
Since all of my tables showed an engine of myISAM, I obtained a list of all the table names with:
show tables;
From here those table names were put into a txt file, one table name per line, called "tables" and with the sed tool, I created alter statements for each table name:
sed -i 's/\(.*\)/ALTER TABLE `\1` ENGINE=InnoDB\;/' tables;
From here, the tables file would have a bunch of ALTER statements that were run. It took a minute but once it was done, I double checked with `show table status;` again to see that the engine was changed to InnoDB.
Continued the installation process and things were successful!
I'm sure there is probably a WAY more efficient SQL way to do all the above but I'm not a SQL wizard by any means. Hope this can help others though.