yeah, it was that and me being really dumb. All those tracks running at the same time kept crapping out the system, so I'd run it until it froze up and then do a forced restart. Usually when you do that on a Mac, it asks if you'd like to do repairs. Every time for the last 8 years, I always said yes.
Just this one time I thought 'nah...it'll be fine...it probably doesn't need repairing. I'm just being overly cautious"
I hit 'No' and next thing I know there's a big question mark in the middle of my screen and my hard drive is gone.