ln: failed to create symbolic link './link': Operation not supported.
I was expressing my frustrations to a co-worker who mentioned the mklink command in windows. Sure enough, minimizing my VM and launching CMD I was able to use mklink to create a symlink in the directory I wanted. The VM sees it as a regular directory but thats ok for my purposes. The syntax is a bit different than the posix command ln:
mklink /D <link_name> <link_target>
for directories or
mklink <link_name> <link_target>
for files.