I will give that a shot. I think I had the merge right in my last attempt, but it gave me a field warning (couldn't populate it with a value). I think that value is simply too long because the length is variable between shapefiles (the process that creates them unfortunately chops the length of text fields to the longest value in it.
So, I think I am going to have to scrap the merge and just append them all to a feature class with the correct schema already.
I am hoping this works (list is the same value from my previous code, or feature_list in your code):
AppendTarget = thisGDB + '/' + "Exp_merged"
arcpy.Append_management (list, AppendTarget, "NO_TEST")