It's a long one folks:

This mod has been working great for me for years but low and behold I just offered to play for the Jarl of Markarth and my play powers (all of them) wouldn't work. I then discovered my Bard's Journal was also gone!

I loaded an older save from a few days ago (I don't hardsave enough) and found that in that save and all my other hard saves still had the book and functioning powers. The only major differences between that most recent hard save and now is joining the DB, buying learning trying and forgetting the songbooks at the bards college, and a lot of dungeon crawling. I retried those things on the old save and everything is still fine. New characters don't spawn with the book but it appears after picking p and playing an instrument for the first time.

I do not have MCM and adding the journal from the ref ID I pulled from the console help adds a journal that is blank, can be dropped, but does not fix the issue.

I've tried playing with load orders to no avail and have never had this problem before, I have not added any new mods either.

Am I now cursed to never become the best bard in Skyrim? Or at minimum replay quite a few hours of gameplay?