Sorry for the past week’s downtime and resultant poor viewing experience running on the backup. I now have a clue why my WordPress does not migrate well, but no clue what happened to the system. Something or someone took out the mainboard, or it just decided to go FUBAR on it’s own.
But every cloud has a silver lining, and this one is the need for a proper fallback path. So I’ll build a more appropriate cold spare that doesn’t run an older version of WordPress, unable to properly import the current site. Thanks again Synology.