Continuing the saga, I called and got a very nice agent in Salt Lake this morning. She went to the SkyMiles internal desk but came back only with an offer to change my flight to a later connection (which would get me into Paris at 17h). I could have done this myself since I can make changes at no charge.

She felt terrible and offered to connect me to a customer service supervisor.

Cincinnati supv. gave me a short "based on your conv with the social media group I am making a one time exception" but added that I should never book such a short connection again for international travel (I guess the fact that the system allowed it really doesn't matter but he made the change so all is well).

Special thanks to RealHJ for pointing out a lot that I didn't know and giving me the specific details I needed to counter the rebuttals I got from Delta.