Brook, no soap on removing the ‘comment’ folder. No noticeable differences.
While I was on a dev site and could be exhaustive, I first tried just updating the TEC and not the Pro plugins. No difference either.
As soon as I deleted the 4.4 folder and replaced it with 4.3.5 the site returned on the first load, front and back.
The very first error after updating to 4.4 was this:
Fatal error: Call to undefined method Tribe__Events__Featured_Events__Query_Helper::add() in `\wp-content\plugins\the-events-calendar\common\src\Tribe\Main.php on line 237
Then it went back to the Tribe__Settings_Manager error. While on 4.4, repeated reloads in the Admin side occasionally returned this different error:
Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 209715200 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 65488 bytes) in ~\wp-content\plugins\the-events-calendar\common\vendor\lucatume\di52\src\tad\DI52\Bindings\Resolver.php on line 119
Checking the front side immediately following that error would get this error on the first subsequent reload:
Fatal error: Call to undefined method Tribe__Events__Front_Page_View::add() in ~\wp-content\plugins\the-events-calendar\common\src\Tribe\Main.php on line 237
After that, reloads returned to the Tribe__Settings_Manager error noted above. No idea if any of this will be of any significance, just all the empirical info I got.
Thanks,