Car all buttoned back up.
Took a couple hours to rebuild the radio harness to my liking but the big payoff is............the back up camera now works.
When we picked up the car I noticed it in the rear bumper and we played around with the head unit to see if it worked which it did not.
I just assumed the installer never bothered hooking it up and it was not worth it for me to dive into the dash to deal with even though it irked me that it was there but could not be used.
In retrospect, had I decided to check the hookup I would have found the botched camera trigger wiring and none of the rest of the drama would have occurred.
Hmmm, maybe I'm not so pleased with myself after all.