Well, after much gnashing of teeth, not to mention MUCH patience / assistance from new friends at TFP, I'm *finally* back to a crystal blue pool with (mostly) operational PLC1400.
Upon inspection of various terminal block wires (not just the one in my pic above), it appears original installer was in massive hurry. More wires than not were visibly nicked at locations where outer jackets were removed from wire bundle. Best I could tell, none were damaged enough to actually short, but I went ahead and carefully re-stripped & re-terminated every single one I could find to be safe.
@JamesW - Oddly enough, connector referenced in your message 89 above was one of the worst. It was already pulled fairly tight since it's such a short run, so that cable was replaced in its entirety. Unfortunately still exhibits same problem when plugged in. Onboard controller randomly resets to 0% and stays there. I did try setting to 100% and it held for over 24 hours, so it seems to be something going wonky somewhere in the on/resting/reversing mode swaps. With the cable unplugged, system has worked flawlessly for about 48 hours.
Couple more followups:
- Any danger to just leaving that wire unplugged? Best I can tell, only lost functionality is seeing and changing Aquapure setpoint via handheld remote, which is no big deal. Same remote still operates everything else in system just fine.
- Still can't figure out mode timing cycles. Forward / reverse is definitely 3 hours, but I can't figure out the cell on / resting in between. To make math easier, say I had it set at 50%. The 3 hour forward period would not be 1.5 hour cell on followed by 1.5 hour resting. It's definitely divided into smaller time blocks. With mine set at 65%, I tried to log roughly every 15 minutes and still couldn't figure it out.

All throughout the 3 hour period had some on and some resting. I finally gave up since it's obviously working.
What a journey but man I learned tons . . . even on a pool that's almost 10 years old. THANK YOU!!!!!