To Kyeong and Cinaed: Thank you for the suggestions.
I am still having a ton of the same issues. What I did was the following:
1) Removed the pybombs and prefix directories to start from scratch. Is this all I need to do in order to get rid of everything I previously installed? I have a feeling that maybe there are some lurking old files that haven't been purged just by removing those directories.
2) Re-installed pybombs with the /usr/local prefix and also additional OOT modules. Those were successful and now everything is installed in that directory:
address@hidden:/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages$ ls
easy-install.pth gnuradio osmosdr PyBOMBS-2.3.1a0-py2.7.egg setuptools.pth _SoapySDR.so thrift-0.9.3-py2.7.egg-info volk_modtool
future-0.16.0-py2.7.egg grc_gnuradio pmt PyYAML-3.12-py2.7-linux-x86_64.egg SoapySDR.py thrift tutorial
3) However, now when I do gnuradio-companion or sudo gnuradio-companion or pybombs run gnuradio-companion, it all gives the same 'No module named main' error, even though main.py exists in gnuradio/grc/. I don't know what the problem is here. When I check gnuradio-companion --version, it gives the same error. When I echo the paths you mentioned, they all seem normal:
address@hidden:~$ echo $PYTHONPATH
/usr/local/python:/usr/local/lib/python2.6/site-packages:/usr/local/lib64/python2.6/site-packages:/usr/local/lib/python2.6/dist-packages:/usr/local/lib64/python2.6/dist-packages:/usr/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages:/usr/local/lib64/python2.7/site-packages:/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages:/usr/local/lib64/python2.7/dist-packages:
address@hidden:~$ echo $PATH
/usr/local/bin:/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/games:/usr/local/games
address@hidden:~$ echo $LD_LIBRARY_PATH
/usr/local/lib:/usr/local/lib64/:
address@hidden:~$ echo $C_INCLUDE_PATH (this is empty)
address@hidden:~$ echo $CPLUS_INCLUDE_PATH (this is empty)
At least last time gnuradio-companion seemed to open; now it doesn't work at all.
4) Though I know this next step is a fruitless endeavor, I gave it a shot anyway: when I actually run my python file, now it's giving a segfault; previously it was the "No module named tutorial" error. This probably is because gnuradio-companion can't even open.
I seemed to have regressed, but I do feel like everything should work correctly if I was able to clean everything fully and just do these instructions from scratch (or at the very least get gnuradio-companion working and get my python flowgraph to start running even slightly again). I'm not sure this is the right approach though.
Please let me know. Thank you so much again for the help.