Thanks!
Hopefully I can work around the CORS issue well enough to provide a basic GWT/IPFS photos poster that will make posting simple photogalleries to steemit much simpler that what it is right now.
I was chasing my tail earlier thinking my interface to XHR object was somehow broken in GWT Elemental2 because I couldn't read the "ipfs-hash" response header even though I can see it in the debugging console. But the reason the GWT app can't read the header is because the CORS allowed headers header isn't being set on the result response on successful post causing any non-standard headers to be unreadable in the browser because of CORS restrictions.