Update from me:

On call #4, I ended up with a very helpful agent who was actually willing to take a look at the situation, rather than reflexively tell me "it hasn't cleared, period."

It took her a couple of minutes, but she recognized it as a "glitch in the new system", and manually upgraded me.

My advice would be to sell it as a possible "glitch" to the phone agent (as that might trigger some investigation), and of course, call call call until you get someone who's willing to help.