You're right, now that they're owned by Microsoft they'll maybe start reading those.

I'll put in a ticket today.
It seems I spoke too soon. There's definitely something strange still going on. The saves I made yesterday are there and work, but if I reload some older saves and then try to load those I made recently, it'll load up one older save where I'm about to enter the chopper before the endgame no matter what save I load.

And now it's asking me about the brightness and saturation again.. The saves started to work correctly only after rebooting the game. Insane.

I thought about starting over as well but I fear losing the saves where I'm at the end of Arizona / in California and the chance to try to pop the Scavenger achievement.
I have that same version.