"DNS can be a bear to work with, for sure."
Stacia,
The way it's set up is illogical: on the one hand MSFT says they want to make it easy by setting up records for you but that's contradicted by the fact that you still have to go in and change dns records to verify.
If they really want to make it easy, they should do away with verification (which really isn't necessary) or allow you to upload a file or use a meta tag as Google does.