Hi Chris,
I suspect your problem to be of other cause than what the op is describing. It is not clear to me if you use the surfacing tool in gsender. I believe I read yesterday that the surfacing tool is corrupted in the latest version (is it 1.5.5 now?) Sure the bug is has something to do with settings not taking, but you never know what consequences that has on the tool.
Since I had a bad run with the tool early in my cnc days (prolly due to me bleeping up, mind you) that killed my first makita, I have never used surface tool again and create my own in vectric. It’s mostly just a simple pocket toolpath, nothing too fancy.
Anyhooo, I get your reluctance to continue, I had the shakes too after mounting my new makita. I just examined what could have gone wrong and ended up concluding that I could bleep up the surfacing tool, but could not figure out how I did that. It got scrapped out of my work flow. Never used it again. Mainly because surfacing is so easy to do outside gsender and has never failed again.
Maybe if you, for now, create your own surfacing toolpaths (assuming you used gsender) you might gain some confidence back aswell.
I wish you strength and courage going forward. Elbows up!