She's all back together with both primary and secondary mirrors cleaned (tip: don't leave your scope near a campfire all night...) and the clamps sufficiently loose.
Hopefully things look better tonight... if not, it was still a fun process and I'll know there's something else to tinker with down the line.
Cheers for the help guys, and a big thank you to Mike and Starkler for their great articles on mirror cleaning and optical issues - following these made the whole process very straightforward.
ONE more thing I will say to other beginners like me: I was scared to adjust ANYTHING when I bought the scope. I didn't want to touch any screws or fix any visual errors for fear of making things worse. And to even think about TOUCHING the secondary? Are you kidding? I didn't even want to breathe near it.
My advice; Rip the scope apart and start over. Buy the collimation tools, read the articles, and break the thing down. You soon figure out how it all works when you have a scope in pieces on the floor and you're in a state of panic
After all that, tweaking a few knobs on the primary will be nothing.