Moved a clone of my site to one of Zarconia's deds (with Nathans help), got it started, stripped all the nefarious mods from it, applied the patch, ran the SSH to remove all the unused folders and files (after learning how to do that I might add) and voila!
Have a lot of work to do but overall, I could move my members to it now if I wished. For the amount of changes and modifications I had, the upgrade really went off without a hitch and I didn't lose any data. Friggin amazing. Looks pretty good.
I'm patiently waiting while the world map upgrades all the member location info ... tap tap tap, that process should be streamlined. Taking about 10 seconds per user, gonna be here all night with nearly 800 of them but what the hell. If this is all that goes wrong, I'll be a happy man.