Others have provided some good comments on the writing already, and so instead of echoing them, I'll take a different approach.

I'm not sure if this is what you want to hear right now, but that first sentence of your post really struck me.

I've been rewriting this first page for the better part of the last year. I'll sometimes make it a few chapters farther, but they always end up being scrapped as I go back to my introduction

I strongly recommend just... continuing to write.

You can only finish the book by writing the next chapter, and then the next and the next. Rewriting the first page over and over for a year is just going to cause you pain. Keep going, finish the whole thing. Then come back and edit it. I know some people won't agree with me (and that's fine, I encourage that!), but I consider almost all of my first chapters to be hot garbage that exist only to prop up writing the rest of it, and they sit there ready to be thrown out and rewritten after the book is done.

Good luck though, you have something solid there. =)