I ended up looking at I²C another time, but didn't have any better luck. It just seems to be a protocol that the 2 types of chips aren't able to communicate with. I have been going over the possibility of using the ATmega chip I'll be replacing from the arduino and transferring my algorithms for reading timing over to it, so it would be able to communicate better with the arduino, but it probably won't happen.

I ended up making a change to the prescaler of the timer on the PIC chip. I changed it from 1:1 to 1:8 because after that change, when I converter the values to decimal, I ended up with numbers in the range of 1000-2000. Since that was exactly what I was looking for, I'm going to stick with that.

I ended up hooking up all 6 channels to the receiver and as I was testing, I noticed hitting the trainer switch (all lines went high) caused it to get stuck sometimes and not other times. I also noticed it worked similarly when I wire was pulled. I couldn't get anything to work that either stops this or exploits it yet, but I'll keep trying.

While I was looking through a bin of cables, I came across some 1-sided copper board, so that should save me some money and make this project go a bit smoother. I have a robot book I bought a couple years ago that I don't remember mentioning before called Intermediate Robot Building that I've been going through. It has information on building a number of sensors that should really help with my project. Additionally, it comes with a fairly complete design for another robot that would be fun to try and follow along in building. But anyhow, that should be a helpful read as I go through it.