Xbox Live Error 800704DC: Just Plain Mean

I'm trying to remember where my character is in my current Kingdoms of Amalur playthrough and I have no idea. The Outskirts of Gilderhorn? Greatwood Forest? Winterdawn Cavern? Bandit's Peak? 

I'm drawing a blank. Hell, I don't even know if those are real locations in the game or if I just made them up (I think it's the latter); it has been almost 3 weeks since I last played the game (the post I wrote here detailing my impressions after roughly eight hours of gameplay was posted on April 16th). I don't remember where I am or what I was doing. I do however, remember my character's name. His name is Muscles. 

Yes, I said Muscles. 

Muscles

I know, I know...I am a 31 year old child. This I do not deny, but I digress. 

I did not stop playing Kingdoms of Amalur because I grew tired of the game or began to dislike it. Quite the contrary, actually. I was really getting sucked into it the more I played and my infatuation with it was reaching classic intensity levels (I say classic because the degree/frequency to/at which I used to get infatuated with games has, much to my dismay, decreased as the years have passed by; what used to be common and all encompassing is now rare and fleeting). No, I stopped playing the game because of a little gift from Microsoft known as error code 800704DC. This lovely error occurs everytime I try to recover my xbox live profile. Why am I trying to recover it, you ask? Well, because it was deleted the first time I tried to recover it after being told to do so by Microsoft support. 

Oh, joy!

I had called support because my account was unable to connect to Live after my Gold subscription ran out. Other silver (free) accounts on my console were able to connect, so I knew it was a profile issue and when I called Microsoft the support person told me to recover my account. The process failed, the lovely error code 800704DC popped up and then I was greeted with the fact that my profile was now wiped from my hard drive, so instead of fixing my issue, the support person made it much worse. I went from being unable to connect to Xbox Live to being unable to connect to Xbox Live or even play games offline since game saves are tied to specific gamer profiles and will only work with that specific one. 

Thanks, Microsoft!

This happened a couple of weeks ago and since then I have spoken to support three more times and STILL this issue plagues me. Of course, if game saves weren't tied to a specific profile I wouldn't be having this issue. My twenty or so hour (I played a fair bit more after publishing the aforementioned article detailing my impressions) Kingdoms of Amalur save wouldn't just be sitting there taunting me. You would think that these sorts of things would have been anticipated and preventative measures implemented like perhaps the ability to transfer saves or something. I mean, am I the only gamer to whom it seems patently absurd that you can have a console with a save on it for a game that is sitting on a shelf in your house (or maybe even inside the console itself) yet not be able to play said game?

I mean, and maybe it's just my age here, but if I have this:

and I have one of these:

then all I have to do is insert one into the other (I think you can figure out which goes where; you're smart people) and within a minute I could be doing this:

Yet now because everything involves accounts, profiles, etc and content being tied to them/solely dependent upon them you can have a game, the proper console and an existing save yet be totally unable to play because you can't sign into your account, or even an online service, as SimCity players recently found out.

I have this:

and one of these:

but I can't do this:

I really want to do that^ but I don't want to have to start over when I already got somewhere around twenty hours in :(

This stupid 800704DC issue has affected a fair number of people, judging by the amount of posts on various forums pertaining to the issue that I have seen, yet each person I have spoken to at Microsoft has been completely unaware of it. You'd think they would be compiling information internally and making it aware to their people so that customers don't have to go weeks without doing this:

Seriously, I want to do that. No, I need to do that. Microsoft, please hurry so I can do that again. Sooooon.