I was down for almost a week.. what seemed like a very long week.
None of the standard tools helped with EFI recovery. I went through all of the tools available back and forth. Created a bootable flash drive with Windows Preloaded-Environment and worked with it.
The thing that
*did* work was taking one of my SSDs, throwing a brand new Windows 10 install on it. Then taking the faulty drive and copying everything but the EFI partition onto the new install, which booted, and had a good EFI partition. So I got a good EFI and its C:\ partition was overwritten by the c:\partition from the broken drive. Kind of a hybrid situation. Then I just had to let windows do a "repair", created a bootable entry with the bcdedit/bcdboot commands and that was it.
EFI is the devil.
I think I learned everything about it and have a suspicion I still don't know anything about it.
Then I cloned the primary drive onto a clone disk, then cloned it again to another disk. So I have 2 good copies. Then I created a bootable Macrium Reflect flash drive and also created a disk image to an external 4TB USB drive, you know, the slow type.
I think AOMEI Partition Assistant has some kind of bug in it as it does not deal with with multiboot systems. Instead of cloning the primary disk to designated clone disk, it wiped out the EFI in the source disk and completely wiped the clone disk. I really don't get it why it messed with the source disk at all. I am 100% certain I ran the right command.
I think I will configure the machine into this configuration below, though I am having a hard time deciding on the Linux distribution. I really like SUSE and Ubuntu, but neither one uses Redhat package management system, the rpm stuff. Ubuntu is a Debian type which is substantially different from Redhat Enterprise in that regard. I did play with Fedora 29 for a while and it felt a bit "Meh". Not as colorful as Ubuntu. I did't care for the Gnome Windows manager.
My original goal was CentOS since it's closest to Redhat Enterprise without all the licensing BS but amazingly, I could not get it to recognize my non-C:\ disks - and I really did not want to overwrite the primary Windows disk. It just did not see them to install itself on them. Maybe I will try again.
I keep finding examples where programs do not deal well with machines in a multiboot configuration, where there are several disks with the EFI partition, etc. It's not that complicated.
Maybe I will try fvwm Windows Manager, this is really old school shyt. I ran it 25 years ago, damn. I didn't realize it was still around, but I really liked it and how you could define virtual windows.
In all seriousness, KDE rules.
https://linuxlandit.blogspot.com/2011/06/fabulous-fvwm-window-manager-for-linux.html
FVWM
Last, but certainly not least, there's FVWM, an old-school window manager for X that's been around for ages.