Upgrade widget area woes again

Good day everyone,

As in the past, we still have huge issues when upgrading our Enfold installations that use widget areas. One particular site has a whole bunch of widget areas in order to serve as navigation for a deep site. The problem is that whenever we upgrade Enfold, all of the widget areas get messed up. I have created tickets in the past and see others have this issue, but we can never seem to get it resolved and then we have to painstakingly recreate every single widget area and then re-attach every page’s sidebar to that navigation. It ends up being a ton of work, each and every time.

We have done all of the usual troubleshooting. Turning off all plug-ins, upgrading with different processes (upgrading orders), manually upgrading and automatic upgrading, but in the end, the minute we upgrade Enfold, it always (without fail) breaks the widget areas.

The site that really needs to be upgraded is a municipality and has solid traffic and needs to remain working, but I will help to make access so you can see what happens.

Thank you!
-jason