Ok I've read up a little more since I posted that, and I am fairly certain I've got it right now.
However, after some experimentation, I've determined that basically what is happening is whatever I have as the first entry in auto.master will become an unusable directory.
Example auto.master:
/mnt /etc/auto.tofu --timeout=60
If I stop autofs, then everything works normally (Except of course for automount).
If autofs is on, the directory /mnt suddenly has no contents (the cdrom and floppy folders are just not there) and even as root I do not have permissions to create a folder.
When I stop autofs again, go back to / and then return to /mnt, the folders have returned.
The same thing happens if my auto.master says:
/mnt/test /etc/auto.tofu --timeout=60
the folder 'test' now is basically non-functional.
The share still works fine at smb://tofu and i can easily mount it as root with the command:
mount -t smbfs //tofu /mnt/tofu
I am really confused.
I really don't want to go back to windows but I've been struggling with making RedHat 8 perform basic tasks for days on end now. HELP!