Eh, I can’t catch a break. I spent many more hours attempting to source game files via ahem alternate means but of course I got some entirely separate error unrelated to this and so lets just say I wasn’t able to get access to those files. Maybe I’ll keep trying to figure that out at a later time.
Steam now shows I have 68 hours of play time… 
It’s time for bed again so I’m just going to go back to basics and let it run all night with full network speed and no VPN.
Has there been any real acknowledgement of this issue from Asobo? Other than that list of troubleshooting tips that doesn’t help at all. I see posts about this from a year ago so it doesn’t seem like this will be taken care of.