Matt,
I just ran into a similar issue with our course in SumTotal. All I see is the Loading screen. This is strange, since it worked just fine in our QA version of the LMS; it only fails in production.
I'm trying this workaround. I assume the launch.html file needs to be placed in the same place as the index.html. So I should probably just manually stick it in the build directory because grunt build won't copy it over, right? I updated my imsmanifest.xml file like you said.
Needless to say, this is all bad timing since we thought we were good to go and I need it running by Wednesday morning.
EDIT: Still waiting on the LMS team, but my guess is the launch.html trick won't work since that seemed to be directed at a different issue. I did run a console check and it returned this:
Thanks,
Arend