Restoring config backups seems to be borking my TrueNAS reinstallation - should I manually rebuild?

[captain stupy]

system:
ML10-V2 w/ i3 4150, 12GB RAM, 4x2TB HDD in RAIDZ2 data pool + 2x250GB SSD mirrored for Jails pool.

TL:DR:
I’m so over this seemingly endless blind trial and error I’m wondering if I should just reconfigure my NAS from scratch (minus the pools which I can just reattach) - but setup the shares and scheduled tasks and what-have-you from scratch again. Is there any downside besides time and effort to doing this that should give me pause or other considerations I should make before doing so? Are there any shortcuts?

I ran into some major problems after upgrading to TrueNAS 12.0 from FreeNAS 11.3 and trying to add a plugin.

My TrueNAS install became un-bootable and would swamp the network with unknown traffic*. I was seeing a stream of ipmi0: KCS: Failed to start write ipmi0: KCS: Failed to reset watchdog on screen.

I decided to take the opportunity while controlling for the USB flash drive boot device during troubleshooting to switch my boot device to an external USB 3 mSATA SSD.

• I cloned the original flash drive to it (FAILED).
• I installed TrueNAS 12.0 to it (WORKED)
• upgraded to TrueNAS 12.1 (WORKED)
• and restored the previous configuration (FAILED)
• then an fresh installed 12.0 again and restored an earlier configuration (WORKED)
• and then upgraded to TrueNAS 12.1 (FAILED immediately)

I feel like I’ve tried every combination of boot hardware, installation base and backup configuration version and even those that work when fresh, get borked once a backup config is restored or get borked when a restored config on a system is upgraded to a current TrueNAS version.

*Durring troubleshooting I learned that my dual NICs do not behave as I assumed on the same subnet and my I wan’t manually balancing traffic by assigning jails to a specific NIC based on traffic to that jail. I have switched to LACP but whatever the overarching problem is isn't resolved so it doesn't matter yet.