I didn't know about that minimum 8 too, but when i think, its totally understandable. I never had problems with this btw. Anyway Chase, your uv map is really strange.It causes brutal distortion on the texture.Just assign a checker map to your model, and you will see what i am talking about.
Looks like it was the edge padding. Good to know 8 and above is the norm. I had to go up to 13. On another note, I know you're suppose to split your smoothing groups when using a normal map, but I didn't do that for this mesh that has 4 smoothing groups and the normal map looks the same. Here's what my uvs look like with…