Blew. My. Mind. Not only because of the radio silence and then dropping back in out of the blue as if no time had passed, but also because they had a data loss issue.
So rechecked out my previous branch, upgraded Scylla versions and sure enough the data differences we were noticing before appeared to be resolved. I couldn't believe the amount of time I had spent combing through my code to see if I had a hard to detect bug somewhere...but nope, it was ScyllaDB (although I am sure there were plenty of other bugs...just they weren't the cause of this specific symptom).
I am actually a fan of ScyllaDB and what is trying to do. Performance was great (as advertised) and management was simple enough; but they are going to need to work pretty hard to convince me "instability" is just rumor after that experience not too many years ago.