Well, just figured out why I was having so much trouble with my network cluster: one of my drives just crapped out. Fortunately it was just a 2 TB slice and I have one copy so I should recover about 95% of it (I was already in the middle of trying to recover some corrupted volumes most of the week).
I think once I get the replacement, I'll bump up to 020 (two copies) but drop the erasure coding since it looks like that isn't worth the pattern until I get over ten nodes, which probably will never happen because this is just a home lab.
Oh well, as far as I can tell, I didn't lose any photo shoot.
Well, back to writing.