So, not only did I lose my wordpress install, I also just lost my several paragraphs talking about what was lost and how I recovered. Let’s get this up for now, and expand it later if I decide to go into detail again.
Long story short, my service provider changed error messages to ads, which I mistook as someone infecting the website. That combined with new errors when wordpress updated beyond the installed CGI made me worry that the whole thing was corrupted. So I deleted everything — it was too broken to back up. (Once I figured out the cause, I can now identify a route… but too late.)
So, while I’ll try to restore at least the important posts between the last export and this one, I probably won’t get them all.