Opening a debugger, I found the culprit. I had previous stripped the EverQuest Titanium client with
EQLite. The model assets are trying to be loaded from the growthplane files, which did not exist on my stripped client. I didn't even think to check if the files existed in the directory after looking at the global load text. EQLite along with the manual file list should probably be updated to reflect this and fix the problem for future users.