Found it. It wasn’t the reinstall of codeworks, it’s the setting of JAVA_HOME="/usr" in ~/.profile and rebooting. I had taken that out because of the errors I mentioned above, but the ironic thing is that it WORKS when it is set (with lots and lots of complaining about JAVA_HOME), but without it just fails with the original problem I started this post for.
Craziness. So there’s a bug. If JAVA_HOME is set correctly, you’ll get tons of crap about it.
On the plus side, with JAVA_HOME set correctly, you no longer have to install Java 6 alongside 8. You can just have 8 installed. Finally.