Crate training failure

Crate training tips, por favor. All the things that I thought I knew how to do from raising Juno... apparently this dog says No, I don't. opcorn:

Cajun isn't too pleased about being crated, but she's not really too bad, either. She's fine at night - she's sleeping in it right now - doesn't make a peep. She has some good associations with it, I feed her in her crate (but my mom doesn't) and she kind of equates meal time with crate time - when I grab her food bowl, she goes and runs into her crate. She'll go in it to chew on a toy. She'll randomly hop in and out of it because she knows I'll give her a treat every time she goes in it.

However if we put her in it during the day she is less of a fan. She gets a stuffed Kong every single time, and she gets SO excited and throws herself into the crate and then completely focuses her energy on working at her Kong. But once the Kong is emptied? We start barking. She usually stops, it's not endless barking... but it's barking nonetheless. Then she usually pees in the crate. Which I thought was maybe a result of her UTI, but it doesn't seem to be an issue overnight. I wouldn't be comfortable making the crate any smaller and I think she lays in it and doesn't care, anyway. And finally, when you go to let her out of her crate, she thrashes around like a wild animal and throws herself off the sides of the crate and just... ugh. I wait for her to settle down before I let her out. I don't think my mom has that sort of patience, though.

I kind of think I know some things I should be doing, but any suggestions would be great. Honestly it's the peeing and the thrashing that irritate me most, if it were just a little barking I could deal. I suppose they all go hand in hand though.

I had to do a lot of trial and error stuff with Ruca (my GSD puppy foster) who'd never been in a crate before. I would drop food into her crate every time I walked by, no matter what she was doing at first. Since she knew how to be operant outside of her crate, she caught on very quickly to offering a down while in her crate when I walked up to the door. But, like I said, for the first few days I just deposited most of her meal into her crate as I walked by to build a fabulous association.

I swear that in some ways she was literally the easiest dog ever, because her 'crate issues' resolved within a couple weeks with minimal (but well planned) effort on my part.

I thought of it as a similar concept to reactive barking/playing LAT... even if I'm feeding what I don't want at first, feeding got her thinking and I could then reinforce what I did want.

Also, we need more pictures!