Unable to flash over current firmware completely. Permissions prevent opening settings, etc.

[AC Question]

First a little background. A local hospital in my area went defunct, and the IT administrators sold off all the old infrastructure to local/small IT entities. Servers, workstations, etc, all scrubbed of data.
One of these devices was a Samsung SM-T337V tablet. The tablet was originally locked down hard, you could not do Anything on it. After flashing several firmwares (all originals), I can actually get into the device, see my email, etc., however I still cannot open settings, or task manager, change Wi-Fi etc.
I have not been able to root the device as of yet, but I can download apps from google play store, etc.
Whenever I flash a new rom, on reboot, the device immediately goes into "recovery mode", which I was able to kill half-way, which I believe is what gave me my current functionality.
I am also so far unable to install Clockwork mod through ODIN as I get an AUTH error, however I haven't tried installing it through the front end as it was only recently available.
So, my question as I'm a bit of a newb on firmwares. What can I do to get these old permissions off of this device and restore it to it's original functionality, just with a stock rom?

 

[zenosx]

OK, I managed to get root on the device.
Going to try and installed CWM. I can also manually edit the recovery data.
If anyone has any pointers from here I'm grateful.
SM-T337V - Current ROM: T337VVRU2ANK1_T337VVZW2ANK1_T337VVRU2ANK1_HOME.tar