So I just setup celery and rabbitmq, created my user, setup the vhost, mapped the user to the vhost, and ran the celery daemon succesfully (or so I assume)
For anyone stumbling upon this: it really does seem to help to remove your /var/lib/rabbitmq, even if the problem seems to go away with updating celery. I was seeing lots of unreliability and unpredictability until I did so.