Hey Matthew,
Do you have an LSA by chance? It will be quite useful to see the the communication back and forth. I would also recommend reading back all the registers after initialization to confirm they are what you expect.
Also, just wanted to let you know we are releasing a new part next week, RF430CL330H. It's a Dynamic 14443B tag, that you program via I2C. It's much simpler to use and you could probably get bluetooth pairing up and running in a matter of minutes.
Thanks,
JD