Alright everyone, since I have so many interested parties looking and asking questions ;)
I found a solution that I hate but works for me. I'll probably have to revisit it in the future but it does what I need for an upcoming demo.
So the problem is somehow still with the code that is meant to draw a nice white border around the image. I believe that what the previous solution was trying to do was to keep the image from spilling over the sides of the graph, and generally just looking terrible. However since the image is already being sized for the graph via this line:
spectrumFill = spectrumFill.scaled(QSize(chart_width*2.5, chart_height));
and set to paint in the top left corner via these lines:
QPointF TopLeft = splineChart->plotArea().topLeft();
painter.drawImage(TopLeft, spectrumFill);
I'm not sure it's necessary to do that. I guess it's possible that the rest of the image could default to some ugly color, but I'm not having that problem.
The solution that I don't like is that my app will never run on a different sized device, at least not how it's been scoped so far. So I can hard-code the size of the image to be whatever I need and move on. I wasn't seeing dynamic resizing of the image depending on the size of the window anyway, so it looks like that would probably be more complex. I'm not going to look into it. So the last piece of code (these are out of order, if you're copying what I'm doing you'll have to look back at my first post in here) sets the image to the size I need, and I can move on.
int chart_width = static_cast<int>(splineChart->plotArea().width());
int chart_height = static_cast<int>(splineChart->plotArea().height());
int view_width = static_cast<int>(splineChartView->width());
int view_height = static_cast<int>(splineChartView->height());
spectrumFill = spectrumFill.scaled(QSize(chart_width*2.5, chart_height));
And that does it for me. Good luck to anyone who sees this in the future, I hope you don't need dynamic resizing of your image!
And thanks QT forum for listening, you're the best coding journal I've ever had. :D