All those "worst cases" would only apply to full-fare fully-changeable fully-refundable tickets - and I got the impression that the OP was on a cheap fare.

My experience, both as a passenger and as a former airline employee, is that with a restricted ticket (i.e., non-changeable, non-refundable) airlines will usually issue a replacement for an administration fee. They won't treat it as a new ticket purchase but merely as a paperwork exercise. It's the original booking that counts. Re-issuing a ticket is simply a case of deleting the previous ticket number from the booking and pushing the appropriate keys to go through the ticketing process again. (Reissuing lost tickets was part of my job once upon a time!)

The reason it's more difficult to get a refund for a fully flexible ticket is that people could abuse the system by declaring a ticket lost and then cashing it in - whereas a non-changeable ticket is of no use to anyone once a flight has departed.