Hi Joe, you will probably find more resources on the Max side. Lots of people build things like this and talk about them on the Max forums, and then they can be run either in Live (as M4L devices) or aside live (syncing and piping audio in over soundflower or similar) or both. The Cycling 74 forum and the Max/MSP facebook group have a lot of traffic and helpful posts. For whatever reason it seems like those are more active for what you're talking about than the actual max4live pages/forums, which are generally more about using devices than building them. There are some differences when you run something in max 4 live, but they are pretty small and not hard to figure out (i.e. Live owns the tempo, you have access to live DOM, etc). I would highly recommend the Cipriani and Giri books on Max, which will give you everything you need to get your loop controller working just as you want it! It's definitely doable. When I was doing shows with Live, I basically never used the Ableton UI after setting up my device chains and midi maps, all realtime interaction was through my own scripts and objects. Good luck! maybe see you on the forums. :-)
