Model all white

[Harith]

I end up making a lot of unneccessary triangles here and there... I figure it's probably because of the twisted "pole" combined with smoothing effects?

Yeah, exactly - smoothing. Just look at the gif below. It's your stone compared to my quickmodelled one. Mine is a little bit to simple, but it was modelled only for comparision purpose.

Spoiler

You don't really need to use smoothing effects. You can smooth things by adding some additional edge loops on your model.

And that the texture's picture size is off is really weird... Following Senni's guide, I am pretty sure I set it to a certain value, and I can't imagine how I could've changed it But again, noob here

When your picture size is proper, but layer size is bigger, then exporting to dds format might change the resolution to the layer size.

Spoiler

If you have any questions/problems feel free to ask me on PM.