Hey all, thanks for the advice, comments, and thoughts.
For those interested, I tried the following things:
1. msp430-strip stripped symbols, making the objects smaller, but did not affect the loaded flash size :-(
2. @@Rickta59 I actually ran across that makefile while Googling around, looks really good. As it happened, I turned on verbose mode in Energia, and rolled my own build script.
3. As was mentioned earlier, removing floats from the code yielded the best results at a whopping 6kB savings!
So, that's pretty awesome, but annoying that I had to eliminate them. Doing trig fr