I've had a few days to incorporate everyone's suggestions. And thanks again for all the feedback it gave me a lot of different things to try, but I fear I have taken one step forward and two steps back.

I tried to concentrate on really stretching my skin while while using a much shallower angle, ranging from around 10 degrees to having the spine right against my face. I was able to get through the troubled lower jaw/chin area (the actual chin itself isn't as bad), but not without much tugging and pulling from my beard. But in the end the shallow angle resulted in some unbelievable razor burn. My alum block gave me a nice surprise after that one.

Long story short, I have pretty much been unable to shave my beard and my shaves have been getting worse and worse beard-tugging wise. It can probably be chalked up to a dulled blade, and I don't doubt it happened out of inexperience and/or poor stropping. But the thing that throws me is my razor stills feels very sharp against my thumb and across my thumbnail and still shaves arm & leg hair with ease. But the beard is a no-go. I have been doing nothing but researching and practicing stropping for the last few days, but I have a tough time gauging my progress since a sharpened butter knife will cut my arm hair while while nothing short a chip of obsidian seems to cut my beard. I have no idea where I am in the middle of those two extremes and whether not I am going in the right direction.

So I guess I am back where I started. I know I have to improve my blade sharpening skills before I can even attempt to shave my beard, but since my beard is so difficult I have no real way to see if I am getting better or not.