Exasperating!
A box arrived from my distributor, and I just went from "Oh boy, I can fix my Rush!" to "WTF?!" in record time.
What was in the box? Just a ramp motor, one still with short leads! The connector does look better, and the zip ties are not insanely tight. But a fat lot of good another motor does me without a new node board!
And I saw how they were sending out long lead motors now, so I can only presume this short-lead motor kit was being sent to all Premium and LE owners preemptively. But this was just mailed the 17th... weird.
Also, it recently occurred to me that before my node board went bad (while somehow oddly maintaining its communication to the CPU so that the game has no startup complaints), my clock never did align to 12 o'clock correctly, and I had fiddled with the settings trying to get it to do so, with no success. I wonder if possibly it could have been the settings I left it at that resulted in a slow burn to my node board and perhaps it wasn't the ramp motor's fault at all? The original ramp motor does still measure 9 ohms on each side at the node board connector...
Just in case, could someone please tell me what the original clock settings were, for when I do get a node board?