Turns out there was an easier way (at least for me). From luci I saved the tplink partition and modified the soft_ver in the partition to 1.0.0 . Then using kmod-mtd-rw I wrote the modified partition to the router and through tftp recovery I flashed the latest firmware straight from TP-Link. That worked very well and I now have the latest stock firmware with software version 1.2.0.