It was an intense month. Now that it's over I feel the weight lifted. In the end I only needed ~1min to run the script and receive confirmation of it having gone through, but waiting for the window to open was something else!
It's heartwarming and very comforting to realise that (1) the recovery process on Hive is so utterly robust and well planned (2) there are folk like Deathwing who really know their stuff and are willing to share this with folk in need - "give me a fish and I eat for a day, teach me to fish and I eat for a lifetime".
As long as you have your recently used keys (ie before p/w change), you would have 30 days in which to recover an account since your recovery a/c is no longer set to steem. I see you created a special a/c for recovery (jprecover) - smart move!
I learnt SO much from this experience!
Thanks for commenting and understanding what I went through :D