I have not found a satisfactory answer/tutorial for this, but I'm sure it must be out there. My goal is to access Google Drive programmatically using my credentials. A secondary and lower-priority goal is to do this properly and that means using OAuth rather than ClientLogin.
Thus: How do you authenticate with the Google Drive API using your own credentials for your own Google Drive (without creating an application on the Google Developers Console)?
All of the documentation assumes an application, but what I'm writing is merely helper scripts in Python 2.7 for my own benefit.
"How do you authenticate with the Google Drive API using your own credentials for your own Google Drive (without creating an application on the Google Developers Console)?"
You can't. The premise of OAuth is that the user is granting access to the application, and so the application must be registered. In Google's case, that's the API/Cloud Console. 
In your case, there is no need to register each application that uses your helper scripts. Just create an app called helper_scripts, embed the client Id in your script source, and then reuse those scripts in as many applications as you like.
How to authenticate as myself for Google Drive API?