Yeah, they didn’t want to fix this part, rather preferred to give me the brushoff and claimed it wasn’t within their purview. Even though their rep (the first of four I got bounced between) had admitted that they were having SQL problems. What had happened was, on Apr 30, I tried publishing a post and errors cropped up in the SQL database.
On the POSITIVE side of things, I have figured out a fix for this problem.
By going back through each and every one of my posts, opening it, and clicking ‘Save’, the tags and categories are somehow re-propagating back onto the front page. So hopefully my experience will help others with this problem.