"... we believe our water issue stems from a rising water table rather than problems around the foundation. We don't believe we have water penetrating walls anywhere, it rises from cracks in the middle of the floor"

If its a water table rising uniformly under the house why not lower it with a drain in a trench down the middle of the basement? If no water is entering through the walls and/or the slab was installed over a gravel base, there's little need for a drain at the walls.

Thanks RES (I feel like I owe you a retainer at this point:). We are thinking about doing that as well, but have been taking it in steps. Essentially, the water seems to rise through cracks in the corner of this utility room wall (by the door) and then in the middle of the finished space where there is a crack down the middle of the slab. If I pump water out of this corner before it rises to the floor, things stay dry. It does seem ideal to do both trenches and then tie them together with some sort of redundant pumps. A couple things probably pointed me to this utility room first:

1 - the current temp pump system I've cobbled together (just to the RIGHT of the door in the picture) has been keeping things dry throughout, so I was comfortable with attacking that point. There was some piping laid for future radar collection under that corner and it apparrenty creates good drainage. It's hard to be confident if we do work in another location, especially after we are finding the installed sump location ineffective at collecting enough water without the drain tile installed.

2 - the finished part has new wall-to-wall (after the last time we thought this problem was solved), so it's somewhat nice not to have to pull it up to do work.

3 - the sump pit is not close to where the trench in the finished space would go. The option here only required a 15' run to the pit, so a smaller investment that might be enough.

If this step didn't work, we sketched out that mid-floor trench and how we'd probably connect it to the utility room or add a second sump pit in a closet by one end of the proposed mid-floor trench. This is what raises my questions about whether all the demo work on the various walls are worth it as that is the default approach for these basement systems. I thought I was deferring that question by choosing to just do the "unfinished" space first, but it really didn't avoid the issue.