Agreed, can be painful. I just went through a clean install and complete software reload to resole a drive partitioning problem that image backups didn't help with. It was actually a good thing since i am not reinstalling a lot of the software I had previously uninstalled as I no longer use it or need it. This also removed a lot of tweaks I've made that I no longer remember how or why I did them.
For you , now would be a very good time to implement a backup strategy.
Get an external USB 3 hard drive and use a program like Macrium Reflect Free or Pro to make image backups of your hard drive on a regular basis. That way, when (not if) something goes wrong you can restore to the previous back in 20 or 30 minutes.
Anyway, glad you are back in business.