Something interesting is going on in DNS land, is evidently part of my problem.
WAN is, unfortunately, dynamic. Have had a DynDNS.org domain since it was free, and pfsense is (supposedly) configured to update it, and reports it as being up to date (green.) However dyndns's own nameservers reported a different address. This may be some misguided part of their transformation to "notfree." Doesn't actually make me want to pay them, for some reason. Does not appear to be a "caching" problem. Appears to be a "reported up to date, but not up to date" problem. I just corrected it by going straight into dyn.com. That was after checking the username setting and re-pasting the password into pfsense - same username and password pasted into DYN worked, so those are right.
Got a quick subdomain over at FreeDNS (afraid.org), had to make a guess at what the "Auth Code" was, popped that in and appear to have pfsense ACTUALLY updating it to the correct address, so a config exported with that address actually connects somewhat reliably. So far. Many twisty little passages, all alike, indeed.