Starting from scratch on rocky, bouldery ground. Your thoughts on what I'm doing

The main thing that stands out to me is your manure and wood chip proportions. Horse manure on its own has a good carbon to nitrogen ratio for composting. Using 1:1 manure and wood chips might reaaaally slow down the composting

James Hird wrote:

Building soil is my main priority. There is no garden without it. I think I need to add more deciduous mulch to my piles.

Here is an excerpt of a movie in which Helen Atthowe talks about soil, maybe you'll find it helpful:

We live on a rock farm too, and are surrounded by thousands of acres that WERE other rock farms. Driving a town over, there is a pile of rock stretching across one, several acre property and it's about 20' wide and 6' to 8' tall.  They've pulled a lot of rocks from their fields over the years and piled them there. I'm 74 and the pile was there when I was a kid.

We have gardens, grass and the swamp, which is just a piece of OUR desert named such and where our dogs unearth more rocks (they ended vegetation there some time back.

At a loss for what to do with rocks, and more rocks, then some more on top of that, it dawned on me I HATE bark for flower bed covering. For that reason, I covered my wife's beds in black plastic and started dumping rocks on them. I have a BUNCH of rings from wood barrels and use those to designate spots for roses or whatever my wife wants to grow.

I no longer have a problem with the so called mulch decaying and becoming food for things to be fought. Instead, I have rocks. And they look better than the mulch did, in my opinion.

Excess rocks go on a bank, which is about 8' tall. Over time, fewer and fewer weeds show up on it.

Now, on to the swamp. There, I have to go on routine patrols related to owning a couple dogs that process food.  When done with each "patrol" round, I switch to using the rake and scoop to rake up small rocks. There seems to be an endless supply of them.  They, all, go over the fence and onto the walkways just outside the fence.

Once in a while, i grab my big, five foot wrecking bar and coax stubborn rocks from where they insist on staying.

Over time, the rocks become fewer and fewer. At least at the surface, and parts of the grounds around us become less friendly to vegetation we'd have to fight.

I remind myself the things I do make a big difference, and that difference comes from just a little here, a little there. . . .

You might want to look into raising meat rabbits.  The manure is "cold" manure and I think would be very beneficial to your efforts.  We have very much the same situation out here in middle Tennessee.