Ah, yes, this ([c-]tab-always-indent) seems to work. On both my machines. I'm slightly leery of declaring victory, but this might do the trick for me. I think the major reason I care about this so much (I don't have any unique-snowflake indentation approach) is being able to indent prose inside comments. This approach would buy me that. Let me run with it and see how it goes. Thanks again.
Also, does M-i (tab-to-tab-stop) do what you want?