@vincej, did you ever get this working fully/correctly? I'm doing something kind of the same, but (of course) totally different. I was actually tasked with overriding completely the authentication of Laravel. Don't ask. I actually was able to (finally!) get that working, but now, the more problems I run into and the more I learn about Laravel substrates, the more I wonder if I didn't do it correctly. I get confused as to the differences between session guards and auth guards and token guards...and I was trying to middleware the authentication, but I couldn't ever get that part to work, at least not how the documentation outlined it. And even today, I'm finding very little on authentication-based custom setups in Laravel out there. In any case, I'm just reaching out to anyone who had similar problems to myself in hopes that someone, anyone, can course-correct my careening ship. `:-)