Update:
After avoiding the problem for several days, for fear my even attempting to log into the site would lock everything up tight, I've finally identified most of the problems.
The 'unrecognized passwords' reveals a major security flaw: if anyone tries to enter a website and fails, the hosting site will freeze every single website, email and protection for the entire account, but won't notify the site's own, or the support staff, despite their clearly having several emails for me on record.
So every time I asked them to reset my password, they would, but they never unlocked the frozen account, so no password I ever tried (right or wrong) ever worked.
But they massively screwed up. While promising the site and ALL it's data would be migrated seamlessly, all they did was to create 3 new accounts, completely undefined, destroyed the functioning site (but keeping the emails, at least), while also removing my ability to update the site (the new sites ftp pointed to an entirely new directory structure, so I couldn't even modify, update, or even clean up (i.e. delete) all the old data.
Finally, although I couldn't sign in, the new account had NO security set up, so hackers could freely wander in and do whatever they wanted to with the site (I got one randsomware threat, so I'm waiting to see just what he destroys in the next week or two).
I was about ready to throw in the towel, permanently close down the website, stop publishing altogether (I'd already unpublished most of my books) and give up on writing for the next couple of years. It had just gotten too painful to bother with.
However, speaking to others using the same hosting site, they assured me the OLD site didn't have ANY of the many problems of the new and 'improved' simplified site. So, despite they're utterly ignoring my recent pleas for assistance, I sent one last request to transfer the domains back to their old site. If they can do that, I'll stick with them. If not, I'll transfer everything to an entirely new hosting site and rebuild everything from scratch a page at a time (since the new site wasn't secure, they complete contaminated the WordPress account, meaning I don't dare restore it).
Talk about an 'upgrade' disaster. They single handedly put me out of business, and then didn't have the decency to even try to understand what they did wrong!
Moving Forward: I'm still not sure about my future. While I plan to continue writing, I was close to closing up shop and not publishing or posting for the next few years, as the country and most of the world simply isn't in the mood for 'complex storytelling', since reality is already too dark for most's tastes. And this only proves that my first instincts—which I pointedly ignored—was correct.
Given the amount of work involved in rebuilding multiple websites from scratch, I'm just not sure it's even worth the effort (and I'm certainly not going to fork over nearly a thousand dollars in ransom for a website which consistently costs me money every year!)
So, as you can imagine, I've been in a dark place for the past several days/weeks. But I'm seeing light at the end of the tunnel, only I'm not yet sure whether to continue to the surface, or simply head deeper underground for the next for years. :(
Between people with an axe to grind bothering my readers, the very public fights we've been waging in the Forum the last couple of years, and the declining book sales and steadily falling downloads, that decision is getting easier to make every single day.
