Did you get the M571 derailleur? What you're facing is very, very typical of these types of conversions. Seen it a hundred times at my shop, in some cases it required cutting off the right chainstay and brazing in a new S-curved one. In addition to trimming the bottom-bracket width down to 68mm to use the properly matched spindle+crank combination. But that may not be necessary in your case, depending upon the measurements we get from our configuration.
First, measure the distance between the smallest chainring to the chainstay.
Second, measure the distance between the center of the seat-tube to the middle chainring and tell me what that is. The lateral spacing between the derailleur and the chainrings is highly critical. What happens when you put a triple onto a bike that was designed for a double is that you may not be able to install the crank in far enough. That's typically due to the chain-stays not being curved for the smallest of chainrings to ride really close to the seat-tube.
So you've got a double-whammy against you. First is a tandem with a wider bottom-bracket. Then using a triple, you're not able to locate the crank in far enough because it'll rub on the chainstays. WIth the crank spaced too far out, the derailleur can't reach up into the big ring properly. That's why you're having these problems:
"if i put it where the little red tag says when the chain is on the big ring the inside of cage grinds on the second ring. so i have to raise it way too much and i end up with it not wanting to drop onto middle ring. goes up good. so i end up angling the thing so that the back of it is in quite a bit."
"now the chain drops down well, but has to be nudjed up. i can not seem to have it both ways."
BTW, the rear of the cage should be angled out, not in. You're making up for having to really crank the FD outwards in order to push the chain up.
If you look from the rear of the bike and sweep the FD across its full-range, you'll see that as it sweeps out, it also sweeps up in an arc. The farther out it moves, the more it moves up and up rather than outwards. There's a limit to how far the derailleur can move laterally and as it sweeps further and further outwards, it just ends up moving vertically with additional cable pull. This is the cause of your lazy shifting into the big-ring.
The third simple measurement is to shift the derailleurs to the smallest chainring and largest cog in the rear. Loosen the inner-limit screw all the way. Looking down from the top, on axis with the plane of the smallest chainring, how is the derailleur cages centered over the smallest chainring?
I've converted many a bikes like what you're doing. The simplest method is to get a braze-on FD tab that reaches out away from the seat-tube more than normal to place the derailleur into the proper operating distances over the chainrings. Due to the wider BB and rear-hub, you need to locate the FD about 5-10mm outwards from it's normal location on a road/MTB bike.
So we're looking for three measurements:
1. gap between smallest chainring and chainstay.
2. distance between center of seat-tube and center of middle-chainring
3. distance between center of smallest chainring and center of derailleur cage with cable fully loosened and limit-screw undone all the way.
If you can take some pictures of measuring #1-3 that would help as well.