Thank you very much, I owe you a rough handy j with an "M. Night Shyamalan" ending.
I ran all the commands. However I notice you said "you should be back in business to use your Volume Control mixer" although as far as I can tell it was never out of business. I wouldn't hazard to guess what ALSA packages to remove and unfortunately I still have sound coming from both speakers and headphones.
It's just so fracking strange that plugging in the headphones used to kill the speakers but now not, no hardware was changed in the reinstall.
In related/unrelated news: I removed old linux kernels today to see if I could and I guess to facilitate updating the kernel even though I don't understand or see how that would effect something that seems so simple…