OP
Yes I'm aware. Mint has had their problems, as have many other distros out there. Nothing new. Mint needed to fix their procedures and they did. If I had legitimate concerns about Mint I wouldn't be using it today.
This should get sorted soon enough. I'm hopeful that Google News picked up this thread, but they probably didn't. Folks should be aware of the risk. My little site has some readership, but not enough to matter.
I wish I had a bigger audience, as I'd have written and published a news article. This is, in my opinion, pretty darned 'major' and should be announced by one of the big sites. As much as I like Ubuntu, this should be news.
As @KGIII said....all this will blow over. Relax. Don't panic. turn off update notifications for a couple of days and elect to watch this thread. Find something else to do with those idle fingers.
It's Linux. It happens. We're using a distro largely put together by humans and humans make mistakes.
As @Condobloke says, it's gonna get fixed. It happens.
Also, if you want, you can probably write to Canonical and get your money refunded. So, you've got that going for you!
I do think that it has been quite a while since Ubuntu had a breaking upgrade. I kinda think I recall one from back in 2008 or 2009? I think that one broke the boot cycle, even worse than I think this one is. If I understand this one correctly, you might be able to recover by just running upgrade again in recovery mode.
Considering how much money I have invested, I'll consider it a good return on investment! I kid! I kid!
Heck, even Microsoft has had updates that broke stuff - and folks legit pay for that. LOL