yeah just to update this, turns out the nudge only worked on the brightness knob, and after nudging it a few more times, the whole thing crapped out, so definitely a bad flyback I guess.
I then took out the monitor and put in a different working monitor with a sharp image chassis I had sitting on my shelf. I get it all in there and the image is upside down for some reason, even though I know it's not installed upside down. I see that the connectors housing the four colored wires going from the yoke to the chassis have been cut, so I try to rearrange them thinking I put them back in wrong, but at some point while doing this in a cramped space I think I may have pulled or bent one of the plugs out of the chassis, because the next time I turned it on to test I got vertical collapse!
So basically I bought a jamma cabinet with a "working" monitor that didn't really work and then definitely didn't work, and then I killed my replacement monitor too.