I managed to self-resolve, like in my last topic, lol.
Putting this out there for anyone who might encounter the same issue.
The problem was that the processor on the VM was set to the default kvm64, and was not exposing the "aes" capability to the VM.
I switched the processor to host (my machine is running an i7-3770, which supports aes), and enabled aes just in case.
Hope this helps someone someday.