I was able to fix this simply by replacing the old screen. After looking at it a bit more I believe the backlight had been broken by some of the damage sustained by the device.
Unfortunately, it’s difficult to get a decent screen replacement for these things. There are a lot of different Chinese manufacturers with varying degree of quality that seem to be flooding the market a bit. The screen I purchased was from eBay and the seller assured me it was OEM. I do not believe it is though. My replacement screen has obvious backlight issues as well as green discolorations throughout that are especially noticeable on white backgrounds. This is with little use on the display with no heat on the display besides from just turning it on.
Unless you can buy these things very cheaply I would just stay away from Surface products in general. They seem to suffer from the same issue that the original Xbox 360s had; cheap manufacturing. I feel really bad for anyone who buys these things new. For the $2700 price tag this particular model had new, I would be sorely disappointed by the slew of issues I’ve read about online which all seem to “boil” down to a classic heat issue that is a by-product of a bad design.